Best Of

A fictitious tv programme:

https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1906697638306554207

@Keir_Starmer
As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.

We all need to be having these conversations more.

I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.

It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.

Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?

Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.

The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.

Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.

But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.

Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).

Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.

I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.

Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.

At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?

Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.

It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.

I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.

The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...

You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.

Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.

So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.

Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.

However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.

I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".

If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"

It's all bullshit.

When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...

(*) Gratuitous name drop

My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.

When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion

Yes, some sex differences are innate

Source, please.

There are multiple studies. Here is one

“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”

“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982210014491

A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.

Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.

Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things

This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable

Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together

One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital

Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging

Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.

No, I'm really not buying into that.

But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.

And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.

None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different

Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year
Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year
Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year
Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year.
Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000

All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...

So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.

A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer

Also dont forget the better pensions most software engineers might get 5% from there firm as mandated by law....doctors and nurses will be getting 20% +

So include pension contributions there you get

software engineer 39,007 to 42,166
doctor 39562 to 44764

for example and software engineers dont generally get paid for extra hours in my experience

I don't know any software engineers that have worked less hours because they reached the pension cap for sure

I think you'd need to get to Senior II/III before it became an issue, maybe Tech Lead/Principal for smaller companies.

Meanwhile, here in .ac.uk, we're trying to hire people on juuuust above minimum wage and expecting them (or to be more specific 'management' are expecting them) to just pick up 1/2 million-long lines of code in apps that have been 10-20 years in the making.

It's getting almost embarrassing.

@MaxPB talks about a "feminised society".

The PM 's political priorities are seemingly influenced by the TV programmes he's watched or retired TV presenters he) talked to.

Meanwhile in the real world, this - https://www.femicidecensus.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/2000-Women-full-report.pdf - an analysis of the 2000 completed cases of women killed by men between 2009 and 2023. The key findings are on page 15. This is the information about the 1,992 male perpetrators.



If the PM - or indeed this forum - is really interested in stopping violence against women, might I politely suggest that a TV fictional drama about a 13 year old killer is of less use than actual facts and evidence from 2000 real cases involving real women over a number of years.

Oh - and schools have a duty to ensure that material used in classrooms is appropriate. They are not there to provide publicity for a commercial TV company.

Prepare to get royally shafted all over again.

Thames Water names US private equity group KKR as preferred bidder
KKR expected to acquire stake worth £4bn as UK’s biggest water supplier tries to stave off nationalisation
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/31/thames-water-names-us-private-equity-group-kkr-as-preferred-partner

Indeed. The enshittification of the UK proceeds apace. We sell our houses to the Qataris and our water to the Americans. What is the point.

All six bidders seeking relief from future fines / damages for "poor performance" and to write down existing debt...
What attracts Private Equity to a monopoly with 16 million customers you wonder?

In the end it will have to be nationalized again to sort it out, delaying that is only allowing further pillaging of the customers and tax payer.

A fictitious tv programme:

https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1906697638306554207

@Keir_Starmer
As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.

We all need to be having these conversations more.

I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.

It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.

Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?

Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.

The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.

Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.

But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.

Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).

Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.

I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.

Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.

At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?

Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.

It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.

I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.

The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...

You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.

Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.

So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.

I looked up the numbers, and a girl who (who goes on to take A Levels) and who goes to a single sex schools is 2.5x more likely to take Physics A-Level than one who takes A Levels at a coed school.