Trump: We’re respected as a country again. I was with some very important people and they said that they’ve never seen a turnaround of a country as fast as this
@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.
@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.
I don't know the rights and wrongs of this, but a statement along those lines is not, in itself, strong evidence. Teenage girls see fewer techie geeks among their peers, among female role models, such as mothers, aunts etc. I'm not disputing that there are innate differences and it may be that 50-50 is not the correct ratio to aim for, but a lack of interest in a field in teenage years, while limiting recruits post-university, doesn't mean it always has to be so.
It would have been fascinating to see any discussions around the lack of female doctors 80 years ago and whether there was a similar assumption that there were innate differences that explained and justified that.
The lack of male primary teachers - as recently posted - is of course an interesting counter-example, particularly given the difference with secondary school. Possibly also largely cultural - as young kids we don't see many male teachers which probably has an effect - or maybe innate. Hard to tell definitively.
But why was there a lack of female doctors 80 years ago? Society was very different back then.
What we're now talking about is, why don't more girls want to be techy geeks (for want of a better phrase)?
I see the same stuff in the rail industry (of which I am on the fringes). Network Rail talk a lot about improving representation of women in their workforce. But when did you last see a female trackworker?
I think push to homogenize the sexes is dumb and counterproductive. For sure, let's make sure any woman (or man) feels that they can have a career in a field dominated by opposite sex. But trying to engineer society so that everything is 50:50 is plain stupid.
I confess, I am ignorant of the details of the case.
Is this an example - like the Trump Hush Money one - where most people will say "that's a ridiculous case that should never have gone to court"? Or is this one where there is a very evidence of wrongdoing?
Because I think the Trump Hush Money case helped him: many voters thought he was being persecuted for something that wasn't really a crime. (And, of course, this was made all the worse because to the average voter, it looked like the more serious cases weren't real, because otherwise they'd make it to court, right?)
So: what's the story here?
My read of it is that Le Pen probably did do the crime but it's probably also true of 99% of politicians in Europe so it looks like the state is targeting her with lawfare because it can't beat her at the ballot box.
Her failure seems to have been taking the money directly rather than doing what is usually expected in Europe which is to funnel it via dodgy contacts to friends and associates. While it's clearly stupid and illegal, it's not particularly different to the rest of them who are just a bit smarter about their theft.
She didn't really take it directly (it was acknowledged that she did not benefit financially), she took money intended for parliamentary aides and spent it on Party aides. It's an issue of naming.
No, it’s an issue of theft.
The EU allocated money for X
The FN took the money and spent it on Y.
It’s the equivalent of spending your expense budget on dinner with your mates.
Bollocks. Had those people been given parliamentary job titles they could have done as much party work as they liked. In expense terms it's the equivalent of using your T&E card instead of your P card.
Bit like if your granny had balls she would be your grandpa you are saying.
We are fortunate to live in a country where not a single parliamentary penny has ever been misdirected towards party activities ???
Complete rubbish, when I was a councillor and someone emailed me about a political matter on my council email address I always transferred it over to my private one. This was seen as really odd, and the officers didn't like it because I didn't copy them into my response.
Those on the hard left like Ed Davey who criticise Trump and wonder where he got his strange ideas should spend a little more time in front of a mirror.
Trump: We’re respected as a country again. I was with some very important people and they said that they’ve never seen a turnaround of a country as fast as this
Deluded ! The USA is fasting turning into one of the most hated nations on earth . Shame the UK has to continue to be tied up and banged mercilessly as Trumps gimp !
@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.
@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?
He mentions the tech sector. Let's look at computer science then. This is from the BCS last year:
"Computing at Higher Education is increasingly seen as a good choice by students - particularly by women - according to data from university admissions service, UCAS released today. This year, 2,940 UK-domiciled 18-year-old women have accepted a place to study the subject, up 8% from 2023/24 (out of 15,530 18-year-old UK-domiciled acceptances for Computing).
"The male to female ratio in this area is also continuing to close slowly - with an ongoing trend towards increased participation by female students (below 4:1). However, the difference remains wide and there is still a long way to go in terms of closing the gender gap - according to BCS analysis.
"Overall entries at A level are up 12% with 29% growth in the number of females in England taking Computer Science at A level and a 9% increase in the number of males studying the subject. The gender ratio continues to move in right direction (now below 5:1) in this area too - BCS added. Meanwhile, females are outperforming males at all grades for A levels - this is similar across all nations."
In other words, women are still massively underrepresented in computer science.
You're a moron. You have literally no clue about any of this, I've been tackling this issue for at least 10 years and have made female specific pathways into both finance and tech. Fundamentally what it boils down to, especially in tech, is that boys are geeks and love to do things with computers - gaming, coding, taking them apart and rebuilding them - you name it a boy aged 14 has probably done it. Girls just don't have that interest, some do and they make up the 30% but computing/tech is simply never going to be an industry where it has 50/50 representation. Boys and girls brains aren't the same and never will be despite stupid people suggesting they are or can be.
Representation shouldn't be about getting to some idiotic idea of 50/50 in a given industry, it should be about making sure that anyone who has the capability to do it isn't locked out of doing so because of their sex (or race etc...) which sadly has been the case in both finance and tech for a very long time, though it's nowhere near as bad as it was in the 00s when I started working in tech.
Badenoch will have made an impact if she punctures this taboo.
She's already starting to break one around the insanity of Britain beggaring itself to hit Net Zero by 2050 whilst no-one else does.
In reality, we probably have the technology and economics to hit the 80% reduction we had pre-2019, but not 100%.
@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 who takes A Levels at a coed school.
Maybe instead of aiming for 50/50 representation in companies, what we need are female-only tech businesses.
@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.
I don't know the rights and wrongs of this, but a statement along those lines is not, in itself, strong evidence. Teenage girls see fewer techie geeks among their peers, among female role models, such as mothers, aunts etc. I'm not disputing that there are innate differences and it may be that 50-50 is not the correct ratio to aim for, but a lack of interest in a field in teenage years, while limiting recruits post-university, doesn't mean it always has to be so.
It would have been fascinating to see any discussions around the lack of female doctors 80 years ago and whether there was a similar assumption that there were innate differences that explained and justified that.
The lack of male primary teachers - as recently posted - is of course an interesting counter-example, particularly given the difference with secondary school. Possibly also largely cultural - as young kids we don't see many male teachers which probably has an effect - or maybe innate. Hard to tell definitively.
But why was there a lack of female doctors 80 years ago? Society was very different back then.
What we're now talking about is, why don't more girls want to be techy geeks (for want of a better phrase)?
I see the same stuff in the rail industry (of which I am on the fringes). Network Rail talk a lot about improving representation of women in their workforce. But when did you last see a female trackworker?
I think push to homogenize the sexes is dumb and counterproductive. For sure, let's make sure any woman (or man) feels that they can have a career in a field dominated by opposite sex. But trying to engineer society so that everything is 50:50 is plain stupid.
Yes, but my point was, were people back then saying that there were few female doctors because women weren't (and never would be) very sciencey/technical and the body stuff is maybe just a bit too icky for them. If they were, then they've been shown to be wrong.
We have a society in which fewer girls are interested in tech. That may be partly innate or it may be partly societal norms or it may be a combination of the two. I don't think we really know as yet.
@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.
@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.
The propaganda from my youth was that if you have sex you might get AIDS and die, and that you should wait until you are totally in love and, better still, engaged/married before doing it - and it should always be protected unless you want a kid. Also that guys want it but women aren't that interested, and will respect you much more if you show you're totally not interested, and you'll get more interest as a result. That made me massively scared and awkward about it up until the age of 20.
@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.
Does this account for socio-economic status? Is this based solely on state schools?
@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.
Does this account for socio-economic status? Is this based solely on state schools?
It’s more that girls and boys tend towards different subjects in coed environments
@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.
Does this account for socio-economic status? Is this based solely on state schools?
I wonder how many non-selective single sex state schools there are?
@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.
Does this account for socio-economic status? Is this based solely on state schools?
It’s more that girls and boys tend towards different subjects in coed environments
Well, I'd like to know if Robert's stats relate to private schools. Yes, I'd very much to expect daughters of rich parents to be more likely to do STEM subjects than girls at the comp.
@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.
Does this account for socio-economic status? Is this based solely on state schools?
It’s more that girls and boys tend towards different subjects in coed environments
Do they? Once you control for socioeconomic background and aptitude (given that almost all single sex girls schools will be selective, private or both) I'd be surprised if there was a substantial difference. It's more likely that private schools and selective state schools which make up the vast majority of single sex schools take disproportionately from that 30% of girls who enjoy STEM and the next 20-30% of them whose parents push them into it.
Buying shares at a time of maximum pessimism can be a profitable strategy.
Depends whether we’re at max pessimism yet. I’m not sure.
But the 2 or 3 times I’ve ever tried to time the market I lost money, so what do I know.
Apparently it’s a mugs game to time the market according to the industry professionals.
I retired end of Feb and transferred my company DC pension to my SIPP and it was transferred as cash, just before the pullback.
I think Wednesday is going to be fascinating.
Good timing - don’t think I would be investing until we have a clue what Trump is going to do so Wednesday at the earliest and I doubt you would lose much waiting another week or 2
@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.
During my time working for tech/software companies in the early 2000's, it seemed to me that, although there were far fewer women, they were usually extremely good at their jobs - better than most of the men. It's like they had to be very good to be accepted, while men would be accepted even if they were pretty mediocre. Not that that stopped some of the men, usually the most mediocre, commenting wryly on the "diversity hires".
Buying shares at a time of maximum pessimism can be a profitable strategy.
Depends whether we’re at max pessimism yet. I’m not sure.
But the 2 or 3 times I’ve ever tried to time the market I lost money, so what do I know.
Apparently it’s a mugs game to time the market according to the industry professionals.
I retired end of Feb and transferred my company DC pension to my SIPP and it was transferred as cash, just before the pullback.
I think Wednesday is going to be fascinating.
Good timing - don’t think I would be investing until we have a clue what Trump is going to do so Wednesday at the earliest and I doubt you would lose much waiting another week or 2
Me neither and that is what I plan to do. The SIPP pays around 3.5% interest IIRC so I will live with that.
It’s really more luck than judgement. But given my previous record I’ll take it.
I did also sell a couple of our funds in our SIPP/ISA as they had become too tech heavy. Again luck rather than judgement.
@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.
During my time working for tech/software companies in the early 2000's, it seemed to me that, although there were far fewer women, they were usually extremely good at their jobs - better than most of the men. It's like they had to be very good to be accepted, while men would be accepted even if they were pretty mediocre. Not that that stopped some of the men, usually the most mediocre, commenting wryly on the "diversity hires".
If you want something said, ask man; if you want something done, ask a woman.
@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.
During my time working for tech/software companies in the early 2000's, it seemed to me that, although there were far fewer women, they were usually extremely good at their jobs - better than most of the men. It's like they had to be very good to be accepted, while men would be accepted even if they were pretty mediocre. Not that that stopped some of the men, usually the most mediocre, commenting wryly on the "diversity hires".
My time as a statto in the civil service has been the complete opposite.
@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.
And a lot of that is down to class culture. Some of that is the tendency of boys to be quicker with answers and girls to think a little bit longer to be more certain of being right.
But also, it's the frat house shit- left to their own devices, boys will pounce on equipment and say "moron" to those they disagree with.
And if it's boys among boys, it doesn't really matter- they all just say "moron" back and forget about it. I've had A Level classes that were apparently auditioning to be in The Inbetweeners, and sometimes you just have to roll with it and get the physics done that way.
But it is a culture that excludes, and a) I'm sure we lose valuable talent that way, b) it's a culture that makes monsters like Musk and c) what we currently do is better than nothing but isn't enough.
(The girls' comp Things 1 and 2 go to has a miniature railway maintained by pupils. Which is nice.)
@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.
During my time working for tech/software companies in the early 2000's, it seemed to me that, although there were far fewer women, they were usually extremely good at their jobs - better than most of the men. It's like they had to be very good to be accepted, while men would be accepted even if they were pretty mediocre. Not that that stopped some of the men, usually the most mediocre, commenting wryly on the "diversity hires".
If you want something said, ask man; if you want something done, ask a woman.
Margaret Thatcher.
- They don't seem to make any concession to the fact that you're you're a woman. - No, why should they? I mean I don't make any concession to the fact that they're men.
I confess, I am ignorant of the details of the case.
Is this an example - like the Trump Hush Money one - where most people will say "that's a ridiculous case that should never have gone to court"? Or is this one where there is a very evidence of wrongdoing?
Because I think the Trump Hush Money case helped him: many voters thought he was being persecuted for something that wasn't really a crime. (And, of course, this was made all the worse because to the average voter, it looked like the more serious cases weren't real, because otherwise they'd make it to court, right?)
So: what's the story here?
My read of it is that Le Pen probably did do the crime but it's probably also true of 99% of politicians in Europe so it looks like the state is targeting her with lawfare because it can't beat her at the ballot box.
Her failure seems to have been taking the money directly rather than doing what is usually expected in Europe which is to funnel it via dodgy contacts to friends and associates. While it's clearly stupid and illegal, it's not particularly different to the rest of them who are just a bit smarter about their theft.
She didn't really take it directly (it was acknowledged that she did not benefit financially), she took money intended for parliamentary aides and spent it on Party aides. It's an issue of naming.
No, it’s an issue of theft.
The EU allocated money for X
The FN took the money and spent it on Y.
It’s the equivalent of spending your expense budget on dinner with your mates.
Bollocks. Had those people been given parliamentary job titles they could have done as much party work as they liked. In expense terms it's the equivalent of using your T&E card instead of your P card.
Bit like if your granny had balls she would be your grandpa you are saying.
I'm essentially saying that everyone's granny had balls but Mme Le Pen made the mistake of not calling him grandma.
I confess, I am ignorant of the details of the case.
Is this an example - like the Trump Hush Money one - where most people will say "that's a ridiculous case that should never have gone to court"? Or is this one where there is a very evidence of wrongdoing?
Because I think the Trump Hush Money case helped him: many voters thought he was being persecuted for something that wasn't really a crime. (And, of course, this was made all the worse because to the average voter, it looked like the more serious cases weren't real, because otherwise they'd make it to court, right?)
So: what's the story here?
My read of it is that Le Pen probably did do the crime but it's probably also true of 99% of politicians in Europe so it looks like the state is targeting her with lawfare because it can't beat her at the ballot box.
Her failure seems to have been taking the money directly rather than doing what is usually expected in Europe which is to funnel it via dodgy contacts to friends and associates. While it's clearly stupid and illegal, it's not particularly different to the rest of them who are just a bit smarter about their theft.
She didn't really take it directly (it was acknowledged that she did not benefit financially), she took money intended for parliamentary aides and spent it on Party aides. It's an issue of naming.
Indeed. In UK parlance it would probably be fraud rather than embezzlement.
@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.
I don't know the rights and wrongs of this, but a statement along those lines is not, in itself, strong evidence. Teenage girls see fewer techie geeks among their peers, among female role models, such as mothers, aunts etc. I'm not disputing that there are innate differences and it may be that 50-50 is not the correct ratio to aim for, but a lack of interest in a field in teenage years, while limiting recruits post-university, doesn't mean it always has to be so.
It would have been fascinating to see any discussions around the lack of female doctors 80 years ago and whether there was a similar assumption that there were innate differences that explained and justified that.
The lack of male primary teachers - as recently posted - is of course an interesting counter-example, particularly given the difference with secondary school. Possibly also largely cultural - as young kids we don't see many male teachers which probably has an effect - or maybe innate. Hard to tell definitively.
But why was there a lack of female doctors 80 years ago? Society was very different back then.
What we're now talking about is, why don't more girls want to be techy geeks (for want of a better phrase)?
I see the same stuff in the rail industry (of which I am on the fringes). Network Rail talk a lot about improving representation of women in their workforce. But when did you last see a female trackworker?
I think push to homogenize the sexes is dumb and counterproductive. For sure, let's make sure any woman (or man) feels that they can have a career in a field dominated by opposite sex. But trying to engineer society so that everything is 50:50 is plain stupid.
Yes, but my point was, were people back then saying that there were few female doctors because women weren't (and never would be) very sciencey/technical and the body stuff is maybe just a bit too icky for them. If they were, then they've been shown to be wrong.
We have a society in which fewer girls are interested in tech. That may be partly innate or it may be partly societal norms or it may be a combination of the two. I don't think we really know as yet.
Mrs J's sister is a few years older than her. When her sister was at uni, her sister would take her to the lab, where Mrs J would sit in a seat and do the boring measurements. This got Mrs J fascinated by tech. To this day, she loves being in a lab. Sadly, her current role involves less of this.
The story has also thoroughly persuaded me that positive role models (1) are vital in life; not just in tech, but life generally.
Incidentally, (*) in Turkey roles are much more defined than they are in the UK. There are more women in engineering in Turkey, per capita, than in the UK, because it is not a 'traditional' role. (23% cf 16.5%). Like Ada Lovelace, it is easier to fit yourself into a non-traditional role.
So think about that: Muslim Turkey has more women in engineering than the UK.
Buying shares at a time of maximum pessimism can be a profitable strategy.
Depends whether we’re at max pessimism yet. I’m not sure.
But the 2 or 3 times I’ve ever tried to time the market I lost money, so what do I know.
Apparently it’s a mugs game to time the market according to the industry professionals.
I retired end of Feb and transferred my company DC pension to my SIPP and it was transferred as cash, just before the pullback.
I think Wednesday is going to be fascinating.
Good timing - don’t think I would be investing until we have a clue what Trump is going to do so Wednesday at the earliest and I doubt you would lose much waiting another week or 2
Me neither and that is what I plan to do. The SIPP pays around 3.5% interest IIRC so I will live with that.
It’s really more luck than judgement. But given my previous record I’ll take it.
I did also sell a couple of our funds in our SIPP/ISA as they had become too tech heavy. Again luck rather than judgement.
Trump: We’re respected as a country again. I was with some very important people and they said that they’ve never seen a turnaround of a country as fast as this
I’m not sure if everyone debating Adolescence today has watched it, but if not I thoroughly recommend it.
Above all it is a brilliant piece of TV drama. The single shot format works incredibly well and is a technical triumph, the acting is powerful - episodes 3 and 1 in particular - and it definitely does make you think.
Enjoy it until the Americans remake it as a five-series, 70-episode romantic comedy with a disabled lesbian lead.
Buying shares at a time of maximum pessimism can be a profitable strategy.
Depends whether we’re at max pessimism yet. I’m not sure.
But the 2 or 3 times I’ve ever tried to time the market I lost money, so what do I know.
Apparently it’s a mugs game to time the market according to the industry professionals.
I retired end of Feb and transferred my company DC pension to my SIPP and it was transferred as cash, just before the pullback.
I think Wednesday is going to be fascinating.
Good timing - don’t think I would be investing until we have a clue what Trump is going to do so Wednesday at the earliest and I doubt you would lose much waiting another week or 2
Me neither and that is what I plan to do. The SIPP pays around 3.5% interest IIRC so I will live with that.
It’s really more luck than judgement. But given my previous record I’ll take it.
I did also sell a couple of our funds in our SIPP/ISA as they had become too tech heavy. Again luck rather than judgement.
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.
Buying shares at a time of maximum pessimism can be a profitable strategy.
Depends whether we’re at max pessimism yet. I’m not sure.
But the 2 or 3 times I’ve ever tried to time the market I lost money, so what do I know.
Apparently it’s a mugs game to time the market according to the industry professionals.
I retired end of Feb and transferred my company DC pension to my SIPP and it was transferred as cash, just before the pullback.
I think Wednesday is going to be fascinating.
Good timing - don’t think I would be investing until we have a clue what Trump is going to do so Wednesday at the earliest and I doubt you would lose much waiting another week or 2
Me neither and that is what I plan to do. The SIPP pays around 3.5% interest IIRC so I will live with that.
It’s really more luck than judgement. But given my previous record I’ll take it.
I did also sell a couple of our funds in our SIPP/ISA as they had become too tech heavy. Again luck rather than judgement.
Thank you. I will look at it. My large chunk is in HL, I do have some in Vanguard too, but they will have similar funds.
Taz, HL is very expensive on costs if you have big sums. I moved all mine from them to ii and difference was at least 1K a year. For short term money markets Royal London Short Term Money Mkt Y Acc is 5% a year
I confess, I am ignorant of the details of the case.
Is this an example - like the Trump Hush Money one - where most people will say "that's a ridiculous case that should never have gone to court"? Or is this one where there is a very evidence of wrongdoing?
Because I think the Trump Hush Money case helped him: many voters thought he was being persecuted for something that wasn't really a crime. (And, of course, this was made all the worse because to the average voter, it looked like the more serious cases weren't real, because otherwise they'd make it to court, right?)
So: what's the story here?
My read of it is that Le Pen probably did do the crime but it's probably also true of 99% of politicians in Europe so it looks like the state is targeting her with lawfare because it can't beat her at the ballot box.
Her failure seems to have been taking the money directly rather than doing what is usually expected in Europe which is to funnel it via dodgy contacts to friends and associates. While it's clearly stupid and illegal, it's not particularly different to the rest of them who are just a bit smarter about their theft.
so she did exactly the same as everyone else, except stupidly and illegally?
If French voters think it's legitimate to use EU staff funds to further the domestic political agenda of their preferred party, why shouldn't they have the right to vote for Le Pen despite the conviction?
Have you ever had the guts to offer an opinion of your own, rather than just ask a question? (that is at best only tangentially related to the post you're replying to)
I confess, I am ignorant of the details of the case.
Is this an example - like the Trump Hush Money one - where most people will say "that's a ridiculous case that should never have gone to court"? Or is this one where there is a very evidence of wrongdoing?
Because I think the Trump Hush Money case helped him: many voters thought he was being persecuted for something that wasn't really a crime. (And, of course, this was made all the worse because to the average voter, it looked like the more serious cases weren't real, because otherwise they'd make it to court, right?)
So: what's the story here?
My read of it is that Le Pen probably did do the crime but it's probably also true of 99% of politicians in Europe so it looks like the state is targeting her with lawfare because it can't beat her at the ballot box.
Her failure seems to have been taking the money directly rather than doing what is usually expected in Europe which is to funnel it via dodgy contacts to friends and associates. While it's clearly stupid and illegal, it's not particularly different to the rest of them who are just a bit smarter about their theft.
so she did exactly the same as everyone else, except stupidly and illegally?
If French voters think it's legitimate to use EU staff funds to further the domestic political agenda of their preferred party, why shouldn't they have the right to vote for Le Pen despite the conviction?
Have you ever had the guts to offer an opinion of your own, rather than just ask a question? (that is at best only tangentially related to the post you're replying to)
Donald Trump is increasing his tarriff war - this time involving Saudi Arabia. He claims they are blocking imports of American pork products... "America has so much pork - the best pork - some people say the fattest pork in the world. But it is unfair that Saudi Arabia refuses to take our pork. So with immediate effect we will be placing 50% tarrifs on all Saudi Arabian pork and bacon"
Trump is also considering the same for alcoholic drinks.
I confess, I am ignorant of the details of the case.
Is this an example - like the Trump Hush Money one - where most people will say "that's a ridiculous case that should never have gone to court"? Or is this one where there is a very evidence of wrongdoing?
Because I think the Trump Hush Money case helped him: many voters thought he was being persecuted for something that wasn't really a crime. (And, of course, this was made all the worse because to the average voter, it looked like the more serious cases weren't real, because otherwise they'd make it to court, right?)
So: what's the story here?
My read of it is that Le Pen probably did do the crime but it's probably also true of 99% of politicians in Europe so it looks like the state is targeting her with lawfare because it can't beat her at the ballot box.
Her failure seems to have been taking the money directly rather than doing what is usually expected in Europe which is to funnel it via dodgy contacts to friends and associates. While it's clearly stupid and illegal, it's not particularly different to the rest of them who are just a bit smarter about their theft.
so she did exactly the same as everyone else, except stupidly and illegally?
Bit like Trump not getting people to give him stock options at ludicrous strike prices. That would be legal.
Instead he does stuff like TrumpCoin.
Fair comment - though is TrumpCoin actually illegal?
I confess, I am ignorant of the details of the case.
Is this an example - like the Trump Hush Money one - where most people will say "that's a ridiculous case that should never have gone to court"? Or is this one where there is a very evidence of wrongdoing?
Because I think the Trump Hush Money case helped him: many voters thought he was being persecuted for something that wasn't really a crime. (And, of course, this was made all the worse because to the average voter, it looked like the more serious cases weren't real, because otherwise they'd make it to court, right?)
So: what's the story here?
My read of it is that Le Pen probably did do the crime but it's probably also true of 99% of politicians in Europe so it looks like the state is targeting her with lawfare because it can't beat her at the ballot box.
Her failure seems to have been taking the money directly rather than doing what is usually expected in Europe which is to funnel it via dodgy contacts to friends and associates. While it's clearly stupid and illegal, it's not particularly different to the rest of them who are just a bit smarter about their theft.
so she did exactly the same as everyone else, except stupidly and illegally?
Bit like Trump not getting people to give him stock options at ludicrous strike prices. That would be legal.
Instead he does stuff like TrumpCoin.
Fair comment - though is TrumpCoin actually illegal?
@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.
Does this account for socio-economic status? Is this based solely on state schools?
It's simply looking at "girl who takes A Levels at mixed sex school" vs "girl who takes A Levels at single sex school".
And I'm sure socio-economic factors play a role: wealthier, better educated parents may well be more likely to push their kids towards the sciences and maths. But even if that is a factor, that still implies that at least some of the boy/girl split is caused by societal factors rather than by innate interest and aptitude.
Here's the other interesting kicker, though: adjusting for socioeconomic factors, girls perform better academically in single sex schools; boys perform better in mixed schools.
The propaganda from my youth was that if you have sex you might get AIDS and die, and that you should wait until you are totally in love and, better still, engaged/married before doing it - and it should always be protected unless you want a kid. Also that guys want it but women aren't that interested, and will respect you much more if you show you're totally not interested, and you'll get more interest as a result. That made me massively scared and awkward about it up until the age of 20.
I confess, I am ignorant of the details of the case.
Is this an example - like the Trump Hush Money one - where most people will say "that's a ridiculous case that should never have gone to court"? Or is this one where there is a very evidence of wrongdoing?
Because I think the Trump Hush Money case helped him: many voters thought he was being persecuted for something that wasn't really a crime. (And, of course, this was made all the worse because to the average voter, it looked like the more serious cases weren't real, because otherwise they'd make it to court, right?)
So: what's the story here?
My read of it is that Le Pen probably did do the crime but it's probably also true of 99% of politicians in Europe so it looks like the state is targeting her with lawfare because it can't beat her at the ballot box.
Her failure seems to have been taking the money directly rather than doing what is usually expected in Europe which is to funnel it via dodgy contacts to friends and associates. While it's clearly stupid and illegal, it's not particularly different to the rest of them who are just a bit smarter about their theft.
so she did exactly the same as everyone else, except stupidly and illegally?
Bit like Trump not getting people to give him stock options at ludicrous strike prices. That would be legal.
Instead he does stuff like TrumpCoin.
Fair comment - though is TrumpCoin actually illegal?
Nah, the SEC just closed it's investigation into the Hawk Tuah memecoin and basically just said, "yeah go for it" for rug pulls.
Donald Trump is increasing his tarriff war - this time involving Saudi Arabia. He claims they are blocking imports of American pork products... "America has so much pork - the best pork - some people say the fattest pork in the world. But it is unfair that Saudi Arabia refuses to take our pork. So with immediate effect we will be placing 50% tarrifs on all Saudi Arabian pork and bacon"
Trump is also considering the same for alcoholic drinks.
"Look, let's be honest, Islam was formed in order to screw the United States, that's the purpose of it. And they've done a good job of it, but now I'm the President."
@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.
What's astounding is that not only do you rarely read or hear this perfectly common sense point of view in the media or in professional circles but that it even needs to be said.
The typical reaction would be to call you a Tate sympathiser and to say this explains why we need even more allyship and action.
Then you discover that a high proportion of those demanding allyship and action are sexual abusers, or else turn a blind eye to sexual abuse.
@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.
Does this account for socio-economic status? Is this based solely on state schools?
It's simply looking at "girl who takes A Levels at mixed sex school" vs "girl who takes A Levels at single sex school".
And I'm sure socio-economic factors play a role: wealthier, better educated parents may well be more likely to push their kids towards the sciences and maths. But even if that is a factor, that still implies that at least some of the boy/girl split is caused by societal factors rather than by innate interest and aptitude.
Here's the other interesting kicker, though: adjusting for socioeconomic factors, girls perform better academically in single sex schools; boys perform better in mixed schools.
No shit, for girls boys are a huge distraction, for boys girls are who we/they want to impress by whatever means at our disposal including smarts. It's only been a million or so years of evolution to get to this point.
The propaganda from my youth was that if you have sex you might get AIDS and die, and that you should wait until you are totally in love and, better still, engaged/married before doing it - and it should always be protected unless you want a kid. Also that guys want it but women aren't that interested, and will respect you much more if you show you're totally not interested, and you'll get more interest as a result. That made me massively scared and awkward about it up until the age of 20.
It was all bollocks.
I thought it was only if you had sex in a quarry that you died?
Donald Trump is increasing his tarriff war - this time involving Saudi Arabia. He claims they are blocking imports of American pork products... "America has so much pork - the best pork - some people say the fattest pork in the world. But it is unfair that Saudi Arabia refuses to take our pork. So with immediate effect we will be placing 50% tarrifs on all Saudi Arabian pork and bacon"
Trump is also considering the same for alcoholic drinks.
"Look, let's be honest, Islam was formed in order to screw the United States, that's the purpose of it. And they've done a good job of it, but now I'm the President."
"The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that Eid, for lack of a better word, is good."
The propaganda from my youth was that if you have sex you might get AIDS and die, and that you should wait until you are totally in love and, better still, engaged/married before doing it - and it should always be protected unless you want a kid. Also that guys want it but women aren't that interested, and will respect you much more if you show you're totally not interested, and you'll get more interest as a result. That made me massively scared and awkward about it up until the age of 20.
It was all bollocks.
I thought it was only if you had sex in a quarry that you died?
The plot of Stig of the Dump must have changed since I were a lad.
The propaganda from my youth was that if you have sex you might get AIDS and die, and that you should wait until you are totally in love and, better still, engaged/married before doing it - and it should always be protected unless you want a kid. Also that guys want it but women aren't that interested, and will respect you much more if you show you're totally not interested, and you'll get more interest as a result. That made me massively scared and awkward about it up until the age of 20.
It was all bollocks.
I thought it was only if you had sex in a quarry that you died?
The plot of Stig of the Dump must have changed since I were a lad.
"Stig grunted" was a line that cracked us all up when the book was read out to us in primary school.
The propaganda from my youth was that if you have sex you might get AIDS and die, and that you should wait until you are totally in love and, better still, engaged/married before doing it - and it should always be protected unless you want a kid. Also that guys want it but women aren't that interested, and will respect you much more if you show you're totally not interested, and you'll get more interest as a result. That made me massively scared and awkward about it up until the age of 20.
It was all bollocks.
I thought it was only if you had sex in a quarry that you died?
The plot of Stig of the Dump must have changed since I were a lad.
"Stig grunted" was a line that cracked us all up when the book was read out to us in primary school.
Old books which used "ejaculated" to mean "said" had the same effect when we were teenagers.
Donald Trump is increasing his tarriff war - this time involving Saudi Arabia. He claims they are blocking imports of American pork products... "America has so much pork - the best pork - some people say the fattest pork in the world. But it is unfair that Saudi Arabia refuses to take our pork. So with immediate effect we will be placing 50% tarrifs on all Saudi Arabian pork and bacon"
Trump is also considering the same for alcoholic drinks.
"Look, let's be honest, Islam was formed in order to screw the United States, that's the purpose of it. And they've done a good job of it, but now I'm the President."
"The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that Eid, for lack of a better word, is good."
This thread wouldn't exist if Le Pen hadn't illegally embezzled EU funds to spend on RN instead. It doesn't seem very complicated to me.
I imagine the complications are all in the whataboutery.
Well yes. But if a burglar gets caught and points out in his defence 'I've been unlucky - most burglars don't get caught', somehow I don't think the judge would, or should, accept the mitigation.
@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...
The propaganda from my youth was that if you have sex you might get AIDS and die, and that you should wait until you are totally in love and, better still, engaged/married before doing it - and it should always be protected unless you want a kid. Also that guys want it but women aren't that interested, and will respect you much more if you show you're totally not interested, and you'll get more interest as a result. That made me massively scared and awkward about it up until the age of 20.
It was all bollocks.
I thought it was only if you had sex in a quarry that you died?
The plot of Stig of the Dump must have changed since I were a lad.
When I were a kid, and this was the advert (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iroty5zwOVw) we used to joke about you needed to be very careful around monoliths and volcanos spread AIDS and whatever you do, don't have sex in quarrys.
We thought we were very amusing, although I realise in retrospect, that we may not have been.
When my son was three or four, I watched my son (half Turkish) playing in a park with an Asian and a black kid. There was no sign of any problem with skin colour, or religion, or anything else. They were kids of the same age playing.
This led me to a worrying hypothesis: racism, sexism, etc, are totally social constructs. They are taught by their elders and the society that surrounds them. When you are young, they do not exist.
@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.
Does this account for socio-economic status? Is this based solely on state schools?
It's simply looking at "girl who takes A Levels at mixed sex school" vs "girl who takes A Levels at single sex school".
And I'm sure socio-economic factors play a role: wealthier, better educated parents may well be more likely to push their kids towards the sciences and maths. But even if that is a factor, that still implies that at least some of the boy/girl split is caused by societal factors rather than by innate interest and aptitude.
Here's the other interesting kicker, though: adjusting for socioeconomic factors, girls perform better academically in single sex schools; boys perform better in mixed schools.
Is there good evidence that boys perform better in mixed schools? I though the evidence was mixed at best. At least in terms of academic performance.
@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?
He mentions the tech sector. Let's look at computer science then. This is from the BCS last year:
"Computing at Higher Education is increasingly seen as a good choice by students - particularly by women - according to data from university admissions service, UCAS released today. This year, 2,940 UK-domiciled 18-year-old women have accepted a place to study the subject, up 8% from 2023/24 (out of 15,530 18-year-old UK-domiciled acceptances for Computing).
"The male to female ratio in this area is also continuing to close slowly - with an ongoing trend towards increased participation by female students (below 4:1). However, the difference remains wide and there is still a long way to go in terms of closing the gender gap - according to BCS analysis.
"Overall entries at A level are up 12% with 29% growth in the number of females in England taking Computer Science at A level and a 9% increase in the number of males studying the subject. The gender ratio continues to move in right direction (now below 5:1) in this area too - BCS added. Meanwhile, females are outperforming males at all grades for A levels - this is similar across all nations."
In other words, women are still massively underrepresented in computer science.
What's the correct level of representation?
That the figures are very different to the overall population suggests the field is biased against women. I work adjacent to computer science and that accords with my experience. I want people to have the choice to go into the field of work they want to, and for employers to get the best people for their positions. That isn't happening if there's a bias against women.
I suspect the number of female brickies is equally biassed. Different genders often have different interests. I notice you aren't complaining about the even worse ratio of male primary school teachers
If I had to guess I'd say that today's decision by the French judges has probably made it more likely that Le Pen's party will win the presidential election than before. Anyone agree?
Buying shares at a time of maximum pessimism can be a profitable strategy.
Depends whether we’re at max pessimism yet. I’m not sure.
But the 2 or 3 times I’ve ever tried to time the market I lost money, so what do I know.
Apparently it’s a mugs game to time the market according to the industry professionals.
I retired end of Feb and transferred my company DC pension to my SIPP and it was transferred as cash, just before the pullback.
I think Wednesday is going to be fascinating.
Separately have you decided where to voli your spare time yet? Beamish or somewhere else?
I haven’t really, no. I am just focussing on the garden at the moment and getting used to the new lifestyle for which the oddest thing is how different time is. I’m not bored at the moment and I have alot to do.
I was thinking of a volunteering role as a guide in Durham as I saw it on the board as Sainsbury at the Arnison recently and it looked fund. I did check the NT at Gibside but there wasn’t anything.
The propaganda from my youth was that if you have sex you might get AIDS and die, and that you should wait until you are totally in love and, better still, engaged/married before doing it - and it should always be protected unless you want a kid. Also that guys want it but women aren't that interested, and will respect you much more if you show you're totally not interested, and you'll get more interest as a result. That made me massively scared and awkward about it up until the age of 20.
It was all bollocks.
I thought it was only if you had sex in a quarry that you died?
Buying shares at a time of maximum pessimism can be a profitable strategy.
Depends whether we’re at max pessimism yet. I’m not sure.
But the 2 or 3 times I’ve ever tried to time the market I lost money, so what do I know.
Apparently it’s a mugs game to time the market according to the industry professionals.
I retired end of Feb and transferred my company DC pension to my SIPP and it was transferred as cash, just before the pullback.
I think Wednesday is going to be fascinating.
Good timing - don’t think I would be investing until we have a clue what Trump is going to do so Wednesday at the earliest and I doubt you would lose much waiting another week or 2
Me neither and that is what I plan to do. The SIPP pays around 3.5% interest IIRC so I will live with that.
It’s really more luck than judgement. But given my previous record I’ll take it.
I did also sell a couple of our funds in our SIPP/ISA as they had become too tech heavy. Again luck rather than judgement.
Thank you. I will look at it. My large chunk is in HL, I do have some in Vanguard too, but they will have similar funds.
Taz, HL is very expensive on costs if you have big sums. I moved all mine from them to ii and difference was at least 1K a year. For short term money markets Royal London Short Term Money Mkt Y Acc is 5% a year
Thanks, I will look at II.
1K a year may not seem a lot but when it compounds over several years it’s a big chunk
If I had to guess I'd say that today's decision by the French judges has probably made it more likely that Le Pen's party will win the presidential election than before. Anyone agree?
Yes, unfortunately.
“If you strike me down I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine”
If I had to guess I'd say that today's decision by the French judges has probably made it more likely that Le Pen's party will win the presidential election than before. Anyone agree?
Yes, I do. Also slightly more likely that the resulting government will be bad.
@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.
@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.
And a lot of that is down to class culture. Some of that is the tendency of boys to be quicker with answers and girls to think a little bit longer to be more certain of being right.
But also, it's the frat house shit- left to their own devices, boys will pounce on equipment and say "moron" to those they disagree with.
And if it's boys among boys, it doesn't really matter- they all just say "moron" back and forget about it. I've had A Level classes that were apparently auditioning to be in The Inbetweeners, and sometimes you just have to roll with it and get the physics done that way.
But it is a culture that excludes, and a) I'm sure we lose valuable talent that way, b) it's a culture that makes monsters like Musk and c) what we currently do is better than nothing but isn't enough.
(The girls' comp Things 1 and 2 go to has a miniature railway maintained by pupils. Which is nice.)
@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.
And I can point to anecdotes that say the opposite.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Much of it is nature versus nurture.
How much of anyone's character is nature, or nurture? My dad ran a building/demo and plant hire firm. My sister co-runs a classic tractor company. My brother is a mechanical engineer. I, the black sheep of the family, went into geo eng, but then went into the dark side of software. It seems obvious to me that all three of us got a heck of a lot from nurture.
Take the classic "pink is for girls, blue is for boys." There's nothing 'evolutionary' about that; it's all modern. In fact, it used to be the other way around.
You are saying that a million years of accumulated evolution means that women are inferior. I say that's bullshit. Utter bullshit. And really, really dangerous bullshit.
@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.
And I can point to anecdotes that say the opposite.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Much of it is nature versus nurture.
How much of anyone's character is nature, or nurture? My dad ran a building/demo and plant hire firm. My sister co-runs a classic tractor company. My brother is a mechanical engineer. I, the black sheep of the family, went into geo eng, but then went into the dark side of software. It seems obvious to me that all three of us got a heck of a lot from nurture.
Take the classic "pink is for girls, blue is for boys." There's nothing 'evolutionary' about that; it's all modern. In fact, it used to be the other way around.
You are saying that a million years of accumulated evolution means that women are inferior. I say that's bullshit. Utter bullshit. And really, really dangerous bullshit.
You're literally putting words in my mouth. I'll give you a million pounds to find a single post where I've said girls or women are inferior in any way. I don't know how you can read what I've written and take that conclusion at all. I have a wife and a daughter, they are in no way inferior to me or my son. You seem to have a chip on your shoulder about this subject and aren't able to think objectively so I think it's best to drop it because it's making you completely irrational.
@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.
And I can point to anecdotes that say the opposite.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Much of it is nature versus nurture.
How much of anyone's character is nature, or nurture? My dad ran a building/demo and plant hire firm. My sister co-runs a classic tractor company. My brother is a mechanical engineer. I, the black sheep of the family, went into geo eng, but then went into the dark side of software. It seems obvious to me that all three of us got a heck of a lot from nurture.
Take the classic "pink is for girls, blue is for boys." There's nothing 'evolutionary' about that; it's all modern. In fact, it used to be the other way around.
You are saying that a million years of accumulated evolution means that women are inferior. I say that's bullshit. Utter bullshit. And really, really dangerous bullshit.
He didn't say anything about inferiority. You did.
When my son was three or four, I watched my son (half Turkish) playing in a park with an Asian and a black kid. There was no sign of any problem with skin colour, or religion, or anything else. They were kids of the same age playing.
This led me to a worrying hypothesis: racism, sexism, etc, are totally social constructs. They are taught by their elders and the society that surrounds them. When you are young, they do not exist.
Such prejudices are unpleasant, but not always irrational. They can arise naturally enough, when people are competing for territory, jobs, resources, and prestige.
@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.
And I can point to anecdotes that say the opposite.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Much of it is nature versus nurture.
How much of anyone's character is nature, or nurture? My dad ran a building/demo and plant hire firm. My sister co-runs a classic tractor company. My brother is a mechanical engineer. I, the black sheep of the family, went into geo eng, but then went into the dark side of software. It seems obvious to me that all three of us got a heck of a lot from nurture.
Take the classic "pink is for girls, blue is for boys." There's nothing 'evolutionary' about that; it's all modern. In fact, it used to be the other way around.
You are saying that a million years of accumulated evolution means that women are inferior. I say that's bullshit. Utter bullshit. And really, really dangerous bullshit.
The argument though is not women are inferior...merely that there are careers that appeal more to girls and those that appeal more to boys.
As I said I don't see complaints that 50% of bricklayers aren't women or that 50% of primary school teachers aren't men. When I was responsible for interviewing it IT I interviewed precisely 2 women...we employed them both but the only 2 cv's we got from women in the first place. Both were good people and worked well but I can't interview people who don't apply as they are not interested
@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.
Here's the thing: even a small innate differences can result in big differences in choices. Let's say (making up numbers here) than men are 20% more likely to be into hard sciences than women.
What happens then is that - because women prefer to hang out with other women, and men prefer to hang out with other men - the Physics class ends up with a male teacher, 18 boys and 2 girls. Which in turn perpetuates the disparity.
And it's why - when you go to single sex schools - there's a much smaller gap in terms of girls' choices than in mixed schools. Simply, the societal impact might well be a lot larger than any innate one.
the South is on track to make historic gains in the 2030 census. Florida and Texas are projected to gain four or more congressional seats, while North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee could each gain a seat. Meanwhile, reliably blue states like California could lose as many as five; New York might lose three. Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin could also see declines.
Comments
Trump: We’re respected as a country again. I was with some very important people and they said that they’ve never seen a turnaround of a country as fast as this
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1906545298983551093
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.
What we're now talking about is, why don't more girls want to be techy geeks (for want of a better phrase)?
I see the same stuff in the rail industry (of which I am on the fringes). Network Rail talk a lot about improving representation of women in their workforce. But when did you last see a female trackworker?
I think push to homogenize the sexes is dumb and counterproductive. For sure, let's make sure any woman (or man) feels that they can have a career in a field dominated by opposite sex. But trying to engineer society so that everything is 50:50 is plain stupid.
She's already starting to break one around the insanity of Britain beggaring itself to hit Net Zero by 2050 whilst no-one else does.
In reality, we probably have the technology and economics to hit the 80% reduction we had pre-2019, but not 100%.
So it would be crazy to try otherwise.
We have a society in which fewer girls are interested in tech. That may be partly innate or it may be partly societal norms or it may be a combination of the two. I don't think we really know as yet.
I retired end of Feb and transferred my company DC pension to my SIPP and it was transferred as cash, just before the pullback.
I think Wednesday is going to be fascinating.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ6XQfthvGY
It was all bollocks.
"Scolded me terribly" – Fico complained that Ursula von der Leyen scolded him.
According to the Slovak Prime Minister, the President of the European Commission scolded him for half an hour, calling him a "complete idiot."
And where is she wrong?
https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1906732273237385325
https://x.com/cramertracker/status/1906723314279514200?s=61
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/us/politics/trump-south-africa-white-afrikaners-refugee.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
It’s really more luck than judgement. But given my previous record I’ll take it.
I did also sell a couple of our funds in our SIPP/ISA as they had become too tech heavy. Again luck rather than judgement.
Margaret Thatcher.
But also, it's the frat house shit- left to their own devices, boys will pounce on equipment and say "moron" to those they disagree with.
And if it's boys among boys, it doesn't really matter- they all just say "moron" back and forget about it. I've had A Level classes that were apparently auditioning to be in The Inbetweeners, and sometimes you just have to roll with it and get the physics done that way.
But it is a culture that excludes, and a) I'm sure we lose valuable talent that way, b) it's a culture that makes monsters like Musk and c) what we currently do is better than nothing but isn't enough.
(The girls' comp Things 1 and 2 go to has a miniature railway maintained by pupils. Which is nice.)
- No, why should they? I mean I don't make any concession to the fact that they're men.
https://news.sky.com/story/virginia-giuffre-who-accused-prince-andrew-of-sexual-assault-says-she-has-four-days-to-live-after-car-crash-13339369
*Starmer not you.
The story has also thoroughly persuaded me that positive role models (1) are vital in life; not just in tech, but life generally.
Incidentally, (*) in Turkey roles are much more defined than they are in the UK. There are more women in engineering in Turkey, per capita, than in the UK, because it is not a 'traditional' role. (23% cf 16.5%). Like Ada Lovelace, it is easier to fit yourself into a non-traditional role.
So think about that: Muslim Turkey has more women in engineering than the UK.
(*) A big caveat on comparing like-with-like...
(1): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtZtgqUotow
I think that's giving around 4% atm, but of course it varies as the underlying short term gilts and other bits of paper come and go.
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.
Trump is also considering the same for alcoholic drinks.
And I'm sure socio-economic factors play a role: wealthier, better educated parents may well be more likely to push their kids towards the sciences and maths. But even if that is a factor, that still implies that at least some of the boy/girl split is caused by societal factors rather than by innate interest and aptitude.
Here's the other interesting kicker, though: adjusting for socioeconomic factors, girls perform better academically in single sex schools; boys perform better in mixed schools.
It doesn't seem very complicated to me.
https://x.com/TheStingisBack/status/1906700509236392022
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
It’s like being near a window in Russia when you’re an opponent of Putin.
We thought we were very amusing, although I realise in retrospect, that we may not have been.
When my son was three or four, I watched my son (half Turkish) playing in a park with an Asian and a black kid. There was no sign of any problem with skin colour, or religion, or anything else. They were kids of the same age playing.
This led me to a worrying hypothesis: racism, sexism, etc, are totally social constructs. They are taught by their elders and the society that surrounds them. When you are young, they do not exist.
I was thinking of a volunteering role as a guide in Durham as I saw it on the board as Sainsbury at the Arnison recently and it looked fund. I did check the NT at Gibside but there wasn’t anything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVggWZuFApI
But the message I remember from the campaign was: "Use a condom!"
Which was a little embarrassing at the time.
That campaign was a credit to Thatcher's government. What do you think Trump's administration would say in similar circumstances?
1K a year may not seem a lot but when it compounds over several years it’s a big chunk
“If you strike me down I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmqy2dsCJcs
https://www.politico.eu/article/elon-musk-slam-marine-le-pen-guilty-verdict/
You don't know what you're talking about.
Much of it is nature versus nurture.
How much of anyone's character is nature, or nurture? My dad ran a building/demo and plant hire firm. My sister co-runs a classic tractor company. My brother is a mechanical engineer. I, the black sheep of the family, went into geo eng, but then went into the dark side of software. It seems obvious to me that all three of us got a heck of a lot from nurture.
Take the classic "pink is for girls, blue is for boys." There's nothing 'evolutionary' about that; it's all modern. In fact, it used to be the other way around.
You are saying that a million years of accumulated evolution means that women are inferior. I say that's bullshit. Utter bullshit. And really, really dangerous bullshit.
As I said I don't see complaints that 50% of bricklayers aren't women or that 50% of primary school teachers aren't men. When I was responsible for interviewing it IT I interviewed precisely 2 women...we employed them both but the only 2 cv's we got from women in the first place. Both were good people and worked well but I can't interview people who don't apply as they are not interested
What happens then is that - because women prefer to hang out with other women, and men prefer to hang out with other men - the Physics class ends up with a male teacher, 18 boys and 2 girls. Which in turn perpetuates the disparity.
And it's why - when you go to single sex schools - there's a much smaller gap in terms of girls' choices than in mixed schools. Simply, the societal impact might well be a lot larger than any innate one.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/doomsday-for-the-dems-2030-census-south-ken-martin?r=cnvx&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true