@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
@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.
I would have more sympathy if it worked both ways.....ie...we have not got a balance of female to male when the balance is favouring males but it seems all to only count if its males they think overrepresented
@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.
I think your single sex schools theory is correlation, not causation. Selective schools are much more likely to draw disproportionately from girls who go on to perform well in STEM subject assuming their entrance exams were anything like what I sat all those years ago. It's a failing of the test that it doesn't play to the strength of girls rather than it proving that single sex schools will help get girls into STEM subjects from my perspective.
I'd like to see how the data looks if you limit it to non-selective single sex state schools only but there's probably not enough of those. Even then it would need to be controlled for girls who go to selective schools in the area because entrance exams are, IMO, geared towards boys or at least aptitude tests that play to boys' strengths rather than girls' strengths.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
@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.
I think your single sex schools theory is correlation, not causation. Selective schools are much more likely to draw disproportionately from girls who go on to perform well in STEM subject assuming their entrance exams were anything like what I sat all those years ago. It's a failing of the test that it doesn't play to the strength of girls rather than it proving that single sex schools will help get girls into STEM subjects from my perspective.
I'd like to see how the data looks if you limit it to non-selective single sex state schools only but there's probably not enough of those. Even then it would need to be controlled for girls who go to selective schools in the area because entrance exams are, IMO, geared towards boys or at least aptitude tests that play to boys' strengths rather than girls' strengths.
Which is true as they are mostly time limited exams just as the more course work orientated exams favour girls
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
@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.
(Snip)
I know of women who quite liked being one of only two girls in a class of 18 boys. They got a much better choice.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
To argue that you have to believe women and men would think the same if you took nurture out. I am far from convinced that this is the case. There is much psychology suggesting men process more visually for example than women and women are more empathy orientated. Perhaps why there are significantly less female serial killers than men for example and pretty sure plenty of women have had the sort of nurture that leads men into serial killing, probably worse in fact
@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
"The argument though is not women are inferior..."
Oh, there are plenty of dog-whistles towards that.
"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."
I have commented several times on the primary schools situation, and that boys with single parents (almost always mothers) are unlikely to get a male role model at primary school. But AIUI the upper levels - head teachers - are more likely to be male, even if the teaches are predominately female. But perhaps that has changed...
I've also commented that I saw an all-female surveying team a year or so ago. That warmed my cockles.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
To argue that you have to believe women and men would think the same if you took nurture out. I am far from convinced that this is the case. There is much psychology suggesting men process more visually for example than women and women are more empathy orientated. Perhaps why there are significantly less female serial killers than men for example and pretty sure plenty of women have had the sort of nurture that leads men into serial killing, probably worse in fact
I'm unsure you'd like where your thinking is heading...
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
@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
"The argument though is not women are inferior..."
Oh, there are plenty of dog-whistles towards that.
"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."
I have commented several times on the primary schools situation, and that boys with single parents (almost always mothers) are unlikely to get a male role model at primary school. But AIUI the upper levels - head teachers - are more likely to be male, even if the teaches are predominately female. But perhaps that has changed...
I've also commented that I saw an all-female surveying team a year or so ago. That warmed my cockles.
Surveying isn't hard brutal labour like brick laying......how many female bricklayers are there and do you we think we do need to do more to encourage more woman to become brick layers.....pretty sure the answer will be no
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
The only female in my maths 'A' level class at the start of the course dropped the subject after a couple of weeks as she didn't like being the lone girl in the room. The teachers spent hours trying to talk her out of 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.
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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if necressary.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
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.
@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.
(Snip)
I know of women who quite liked being one of only two girls in a class of 18 boys. They got a much better choice.
Though the phrase I remember was "the odds may be good, but the goods are odd".
For those interested in the actual data, here's a report from the IOP. Over a decade old, but I don't think there's much changed since.
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”
Probably will be about as successful as the Trump lawfare cases..💩
@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.
What the fuck is this shit, @MaxPB didn’t say anything about gender inferiority. Retract
@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.
(Snip)
I know of women who quite liked being one of only two girls in a class of 18 boys. They got a much better choice.
Though the phrase I remember was "the odds may be good, but the goods are odd".
For those interested in the actual data, here's a report from the IOP. Over a decade old, but I don't think there's much changed since.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
@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
"The argument though is not women are inferior..."
Oh, there are plenty of dog-whistles towards that.
"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."
I have commented several times on the primary schools situation, and that boys with single parents (almost always mothers) are unlikely to get a male role model at primary school. But AIUI the upper levels - head teachers - are more likely to be male, even if the teaches are predominately female. But perhaps that has changed...
I've also commented that I saw an all-female surveying team a year or so ago. That warmed my cockles.
Surveying isn't hard brutal labour like brick laying......how many female bricklayers are there and do you we think we do need to do more to encourage more woman to become brick layers.....pretty sure the answer will be no
I think the answer is yes.
And I've done surveying. And a tiny bit of bricklaying. And both can be brutal and physical - certainly compared to flipping bits.
Like lorry driving, bricklaying is becoming *less* physically demanding. In ye olden days, a lorry driver would have no power steering, and mostly do not need to lift heavy boxes to offload. In bricklaying, you don't need to climb ladders with heavy brick hods on your shoulder (*); the telehandler delivers the bricks to you on the second floor.
As an aside, I recently saw roof trusses being delivered *and positioned on the roof* straight from the delivery lorry. No putting them on the ground in between. My flabber was ghasted.
@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
"The argument though is not women are inferior..."
Oh, there are plenty of dog-whistles towards that.
"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."
I have commented several times on the primary schools situation, and that boys with single parents (almost always mothers) are unlikely to get a male role model at primary school. But AIUI the upper levels - head teachers - are more likely to be male, even if the teaches are predominately female. But perhaps that has changed...
I've also commented that I saw an all-female surveying team a year or so ago. That warmed my cockles.
Surveying isn't hard brutal labour like brick laying......how many female bricklayers are there and do you we think we do need to do more to encourage more woman to become brick layers.....pretty sure the answer will be no
I think the answer is yes.
And I've done surveying. And a tiny bit of bricklaying. And both can be brutal and physical - certainly compared to flipping bits.
Like lorry driving, bricklaying is becoming *less* physically demanding. In ye olden days, a lorry driver would have no power steering, and mostly do not need to lift heavy boxes to offload. In bricklaying, you don't need to climb ladders with heavy brick hods on your shoulder (*); the telehandler delivers the bricks to you on the second floor.
As an aside, I recently saw roof trusses being delivered *and positioned on the roof* straight from the delivery lorry. No putting them on the ground in between. My flabber was ghasted.
(*) Which was often the apprentice's job...
And the percentage of female bricklayers despite that is I am guessing still low
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"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.
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
"The argument though is not women are inferior..."
Oh, there are plenty of dog-whistles towards that.
"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."
I have commented several times on the primary schools situation, and that boys with single parents (almost always mothers) are unlikely to get a male role model at primary school. But AIUI the upper levels - head teachers - are more likely to be male, even if the teaches are predominately female. But perhaps that has changed...
I've also commented that I saw an all-female surveying team a year or so ago. That warmed my cockles.
Surveying isn't hard brutal labour like brick laying......how many female bricklayers are there and do you we think we do need to do more to encourage more woman to become brick layers.....pretty sure the answer will be no
I think the answer is yes.
And I've done surveying. And a tiny bit of bricklaying. And both can be brutal and physical - certainly compared to flipping bits.
Like lorry driving, bricklaying is becoming *less* physically demanding. In ye olden days, a lorry driver would have no power steering, and mostly do not need to lift heavy boxes to offload. In bricklaying, you don't need to climb ladders with heavy brick hods on your shoulder (*); the telehandler delivers the bricks to you on the second floor.
As an aside, I recently saw roof trusses being delivered *and positioned on the roof* straight from the delivery lorry. No putting them on the ground in between. My flabber was ghasted.
(*) Which was often the apprentice's job...
And the percentage of female bricklayers despite that is I am guessing still low
Basically if you think there should be a 50/50 gender split argue it for all jobs not just ones you choose is my point. You only seem to argue for ones where you thing there arent enough females for good jobs
@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
"The argument though is not women are inferior..."
Oh, there are plenty of dog-whistles towards that.
"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."
I have commented several times on the primary schools situation, and that boys with single parents (almost always mothers) are unlikely to get a male role model at primary school. But AIUI the upper levels - head teachers - are more likely to be male, even if the teaches are predominately female. But perhaps that has changed...
I've also commented that I saw an all-female surveying team a year or so ago. That warmed my cockles.
Surveying isn't hard brutal labour like brick laying......how many female bricklayers are there and do you we think we do need to do more to encourage more woman to become brick layers.....pretty sure the answer will be no
I think the answer is yes.
And I've done surveying. And a tiny bit of bricklaying. And both can be brutal and physical - certainly compared to flipping bits.
Like lorry driving, bricklaying is becoming *less* physically demanding. In ye olden days, a lorry driver would have no power steering, and mostly do not need to lift heavy boxes to offload. In bricklaying, you don't need to climb ladders with heavy brick hods on your shoulder (*); the telehandler delivers the bricks to you on the second floor.
As an aside, I recently saw roof trusses being delivered *and positioned on the roof* straight from the delivery lorry. No putting them on the ground in between. My flabber was ghasted.
(*) Which was often the apprentice's job...
And the percentage of female bricklayers despite that is I am guessing still low
Yes. And your point is? That there is some intrinsic, genetic reason why women are massively less able to be bricklayers than men?
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
In truth, you're the one being misogynistic because you are equating difference from men with inferiority.
@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
"The argument though is not women are inferior..."
Oh, there are plenty of dog-whistles towards that.
"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."
I have commented several times on the primary schools situation, and that boys with single parents (almost always mothers) are unlikely to get a male role model at primary school. But AIUI the upper levels - head teachers - are more likely to be male, even if the teaches are predominately female. But perhaps that has changed...
I've also commented that I saw an all-female surveying team a year or so ago. That warmed my cockles.
Surveying isn't hard brutal labour like brick laying......how many female bricklayers are there and do you we think we do need to do more to encourage more woman to become brick layers.....pretty sure the answer will be no
I think the answer is yes.
And I've done surveying. And a tiny bit of bricklaying. And both can be brutal and physical - certainly compared to flipping bits.
Like lorry driving, bricklaying is becoming *less* physically demanding. In ye olden days, a lorry driver would have no power steering, and mostly do not need to lift heavy boxes to offload. In bricklaying, you don't need to climb ladders with heavy brick hods on your shoulder (*); the telehandler delivers the bricks to you on the second floor.
As an aside, I recently saw roof trusses being delivered *and positioned on the roof* straight from the delivery lorry. No putting them on the ground in between. My flabber was ghasted.
(*) Which was often the apprentice's job...
And the percentage of female bricklayers despite that is I am guessing still low
Basically if you think there should be a 50/50 gender split argue it for all jobs not just ones you choose is my point. You only seem to argue for ones where you thing there arent enough females for good jobs
(Assuming you're replying to me...)
I've pointed out before on here that there should be more male primary school teachers. Including on this thread, I think.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
In truth, you're the one being misogynistic because you are equating difference from men with inferiority.
Am I?
Or are those equating more men in a role as women being inferior for that role?
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
In truth, you're the one being misogynistic because you are equating difference from men with inferiority.
Indeed, but he can't see that. Completely blinkered.
@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%.
When you say “no-one else does”… https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-net-zero-target-evaluations/ says that, “As of November 2023, around 145 countries had announced or are considering net zero targets, covering close to 90% of global emissions (Figure 1). Among these are China, the EU, the USA, and India, who jointly represent more than half of global greenhouse gas emissions.”
Obviously, the US has now dropped theirs. Targets vary from country to country in terms of what they cover and the target year, but many are also for 2050, including the EU, Chile, Colombia, South Korea, Australia, Japan, Singapore and Brazil. Some are for even earlier, namely Germany and Nepal aiming for 2045.
@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
"The argument though is not women are inferior..."
Oh, there are plenty of dog-whistles towards that.
"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."
I have commented several times on the primary schools situation, and that boys with single parents (almost always mothers) are unlikely to get a male role model at primary school. But AIUI the upper levels - head teachers - are more likely to be male, even if the teaches are predominately female. But perhaps that has changed...
I've also commented that I saw an all-female surveying team a year or so ago. That warmed my cockles.
Surveying isn't hard brutal labour like brick laying......how many female bricklayers are there and do you we think we do need to do more to encourage more woman to become brick layers.....pretty sure the answer will be no
I think the answer is yes.
And I've done surveying. And a tiny bit of bricklaying. And both can be brutal and physical - certainly compared to flipping bits.
Like lorry driving, bricklaying is becoming *less* physically demanding. In ye olden days, a lorry driver would have no power steering, and mostly do not need to lift heavy boxes to offload. In bricklaying, you don't need to climb ladders with heavy brick hods on your shoulder (*); the telehandler delivers the bricks to you on the second floor.
As an aside, I recently saw roof trusses being delivered *and positioned on the roof* straight from the delivery lorry. No putting them on the ground in between. My flabber was ghasted.
(*) Which was often the apprentice's job...
And the percentage of female bricklayers despite that is I am guessing still low
Basically if you think there should be a 50/50 gender split argue it for all jobs not just ones you choose is my point. You only seem to argue for ones where you thing there arent enough females for good jobs
(Assuming you're replying to me...)
I've pointed out before on here that there should be more male primary school teachers. Including on this thread, I think.
Yes you have but you also only advocated for measures to get more women into jobs, you haven't once advocated for measures to get more male primary school teachers
@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.
(Snip)
I know of women who quite liked being one of only two girls in a class of 18 boys. They got a much better choice.
Though the phrase I remember was "the odds may be good, but the goods are odd".
For those interested in the actual data, here's a report from the IOP. Over a decade old, but I don't think there's much changed since.
The situation is a bit less bad in indy schools, but even there girls get put off studying physics by the presence of boys.
Why is it only a concern for employment that is male dominated but not female dominated?
It isn’t. There are fields of work that are female dominated where there is an acknowledged imbalance that society would benefit from being addressed. Elderly social care for example, where men get feedback as being less condescending. But particularly primary school teaching.
At my children’s school there were always one or two male teachers, but now my youngest daughter is in year 6 and the men have gone. They really miss them.
But nature is nature and I think it would be mad to argue there aren’t inbuilt differences in how males and females enjoy different things. The secret is to avoid the ideological dead ends that argue we need to either enforce a strictly traditional separation of roles or insist on equal representation in all occupations.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
Show me where you've said you think women are equal to men, or, heaven forfend, better than men. As for your question: I'd say this entire thread is you excusing disparities between men and women.
As for legal action: that's lawfare, isn't it? And you *hate* that.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
The idea that evolution tells us much about the current human condition is pretty odd, when you stop and think about it.
Modern industrial society is... about 200 years old? There is no way that is meaningfully affecting evolution yet. Indeed, a lot of our problems as a society come from the fact that we're cavemen in suits.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
Don't you Radical Right Lunatics believe in freedom of speech?
@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%.
When you say “no-one else does”… https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-net-zero-target-evaluations/ says that, “As of November 2023, around 145 countries had announced or are considering net zero targets, covering close to 90% of global emissions (Figure 1). Among these are China, the EU, the USA, and India, who jointly represent more than half of global greenhouse gas emissions.”
Obviously, the US has now dropped theirs. Targets vary from country to country in terms of what they cover and the target year, but many are also for 2050, including the EU, Chile, Colombia, South Korea, Australia, Japan, Singapore and Brazil. Some are for even earlier, namely Germany and Nepal aiming for 2045.
Advocates of net zero should embrace the fact Trump doesn’t believe in it as an extremely compelling reason to push ahead.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
Show me where you've said you think women are equal to men, or, heaven forfend, better than men. As for your question: I'd say this entire thread is you excusing disparities between men and women.
As for legal action: that's lawfare, isn't it? And you *hate* that.
Burden of proof is on you - he clearly didn't say that. You're obviously in the wrong - just apologise and move on?
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
Show me where you've said you think women are equal to men, or, heaven forfend, better than men. As for your question: I'd say this entire thread is you excusing disparities between men and women.
As for legal action: that's lawfare, isn't it? And you *hate* that.
Firstly, you've made a specific accusation against me, the burden of proof rests upon you to back that up with specific evidence, you have failed on three occasions to do so only offering generic statements and nothing concrete or specific. Secondly, I literally said in the following post that I do not believe women or girls inferior to men in any way, even though I shouldn't have to defend myself from your unfounded bullshit. Thirdly, you are getting very close to libel and I know that the moderators take a dim view of such things on the site.
@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.
Statistics is a discipline where we’ve seen a huge shift from mainly men to mainly women in my lifetime. When I was studying stats, it was about 50/50, but the lecturers were all men. Now, the youngsters I meet are nearly all women in the field.
That change suggests to me that there’s no innate gender difference to ability to do statistics. It’s just that the culture once pushed people one way and now goes the other way.
@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
"The argument though is not women are inferior..."
Oh, there are plenty of dog-whistles towards that.
"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."
I have commented several times on the primary schools situation, and that boys with single parents (almost always mothers) are unlikely to get a male role model at primary school. But AIUI the upper levels - head teachers - are more likely to be male, even if the teaches are predominately female. But perhaps that has changed...
I've also commented that I saw an all-female surveying team a year or so ago. That warmed my cockles.
Surveying isn't hard brutal labour like brick laying......how many female bricklayers are there and do you we think we do need to do more to encourage more woman to become brick layers.....pretty sure the answer will be no
I think the answer is yes.
And I've done surveying. And a tiny bit of bricklaying. And both can be brutal and physical - certainly compared to flipping bits.
Like lorry driving, bricklaying is becoming *less* physically demanding. In ye olden days, a lorry driver would have no power steering, and mostly do not need to lift heavy boxes to offload. In bricklaying, you don't need to climb ladders with heavy brick hods on your shoulder (*); the telehandler delivers the bricks to you on the second floor.
As an aside, I recently saw roof trusses being delivered *and positioned on the roof* straight from the delivery lorry. No putting them on the ground in between. My flabber was ghasted.
(*) Which was often the apprentice's job...
And the percentage of female bricklayers despite that is I am guessing still low
Basically if you think there should be a 50/50 gender split argue it for all jobs not just ones you choose is my point. You only seem to argue for ones where you thing there arent enough females for good jobs
(Assuming you're replying to me...)
I've pointed out before on here that there should be more male primary school teachers. Including on this thread, I think.
Yes you have but you also only advocated for measures to get more women into jobs, you haven't once advocated for measures to get more male primary school teachers
Ahem. I believe I have in the past, very strongly. In particularly (and from memory), the disparity between female teachers and male heads. And the necessity of doing so. It's why I also don't favour single-sex schools.
I haven't seen figures to see if the disparity between teachers and heads continues.
But to take this to a serious point: nature versus nurture fascinates me.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
Show me where you've said you think women are equal to men, or, heaven forfend, better than men. As for your question: I'd say this entire thread is you excusing disparities between men and women.
As for legal action: that's lawfare, isn't it? And you *hate* that.
Firstly, you've made a specific accusation against me, the burden of proof rests upon you to back that up with specific evidence, you have failed on three occasions to do so only offering generic statements and nothing concrete or specific. Secondly, I literally said in the following post that I do not believe women or girls inferior to men in any way, even though I shouldn't have to defend myself from your unfounded bullshit. Thirdly, you are getting very close to libel and I know that the moderators take a dim view of such things on the site.
@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.
(Snip)
I know of women who quite liked being one of only two girls in a class of 18 boys. They got a much better choice.
Though the phrase I remember was "the odds may be good, but the goods are odd".
For those interested in the actual data, here's a report from the IOP. Over a decade old, but I don't think there's much changed since.
The situation is a bit less bad in indy schools, but even there girls get put off studying physics by the presence of boys.
Why is it only a concern for employment that is male dominated but not female dominated?
It isn’t. There are fields of work that are female dominated where there is an acknowledged imbalance that society would benefit from being addressed. Elderly social care for example, where men get feedback as being less condescending. But particularly primary school teaching.
At my children’s school there were always one or two male teachers, but now my youngest daughter is in year 6 and the men have gone. They really miss them.
But nature is nature and I think it would be mad to argue there aren’t inbuilt differences in how males and females enjoy different things. The secret is to avoid the ideological dead ends that argue we need to either enforce a strictly traditional separation of roles or insist on equal representation in all occupations.
That was the point I was making, yes there is some nurture involved but male brains and female brains have different strengths, note not inferior, but ones that push them in different directions. I think a feminist even wrote a book about it once...men are from mars women are from venus.
I think everyone man or woman should have full opportunity to progress in a career that attract them, I have worked with many women and never had a problem indeed. Objecting to the gender mix however all other things being equal implies you think they think the same, I suspect the truth is most women think like women...most men think like men....the crossovers are the ones that end up in careers dominated by the opposite sex
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
Show me where you've said you think women are equal to men, or, heaven forfend, better than men. As for your question: I'd say this entire thread is you excusing disparities between men and women.
As for legal action: that's lawfare, isn't it? And you *hate* that.
Firstly, you've made a specific accusation against me, the burden of proof rests upon you to back that up with specific evidence, you have failed on three occasions to do so only offering generic statements and nothing concrete or specific. Secondly, I literally said in the following post that I do not believe women or girls inferior to men in any way, even though I shouldn't have to defend myself from your unfounded bullshit. Thirdly, you are getting very close to libel and I know that the moderators take a dim view of such things on the site.
I take this thread as evidence.
Mods: if you disagree, please ban me.
So still nothing specific then? You can produce no evidence to backup your claims. I'll ask one last time. Produce any specific words or wording that I have written where I say women are inferior to men or retract your statement. I've given you three very fair chances to do so, last time of asking to do either one.
The challenges raised by Adolescence aren't something we can simply legislate for — if I could pull a lever to solve it, I would.
It's only by listening and learning from the experiences of young people and charities that we can tackle this.
That's what I've been doing today.
IT'S A FICTIONAL SHOW YOU UTTER HELMET.
*Starmer not you.
Do you not think that fiction can contain truths about ourselves and society? Do you see no value in fiction beyond mere entertainment?
Shakespeare's Richard III is fiction, but it's a hell of a lot closer to reality than much of the supposedly factual nonsense pumped out by the Richard III Society.
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.
Ed Davey on the hard left?
Come on - Ed Davey is an orange booker, and wrote the chapter on "Liberalism and localism". It isn't so long since he was being called a Tory by some on the left, and was in coalition with the Cons at cabinet level.
I think you are a Conservative? If the blues are getting their Overton Window this far out of whack, it's no wonder they are still up a creek without a paddle.
@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
OldKingCole talked about the lack of male primary school teachers, and I liked his post - not that I expect you to check who liked which posts! I very much agree with OKC and strongly support schemes to get more men into primary school teaching. It’s not an area I work in, so I can’t comment as much.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
Show me where you've said you think women are equal to men, or, heaven forfend, better than men. As for your question: I'd say this entire thread is you excusing disparities between men and women.
As for legal action: that's lawfare, isn't it? And you *hate* that.
Burden of proof is on you - he clearly didn't say that. You're obviously in the wrong - just apologise and move on?
As I said, this entire thread indicates that's his thinking. I'd particularly point out where he said that he would freeze a program at 70/30 in favour of men.
If mods think I've gone too far, they can ban me. I've never been banned before, and it'd feel odd to be banned for that, given everything else I've said.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
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.
Ed Davey on the hard left?
Come on - Ed Davey is an orange booker, and wrote the chapter on "Liberalism and localism". It isn't so long since he was being called a Tory by some on the left, and was in coalition with the Cons at cabinet level.
I think you are a Conservative? If the blues are getting their Overton Window this far out of whack, it's no wonder they are still up a creek without a paddle.
LibDems are listed as "centre to centre-left" on Wikipedia
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
Show me where you've said you think women are equal to men, or, heaven forfend, better than men. As for your question: I'd say this entire thread is you excusing disparities between men and women.
As for legal action: that's lawfare, isn't it? And you *hate* that.
Firstly, you've made a specific accusation against me, the burden of proof rests upon you to back that up with specific evidence, you have failed on three occasions to do so only offering generic statements and nothing concrete or specific. Secondly, I literally said in the following post that I do not believe women or girls inferior to men in any way, even though I shouldn't have to defend myself from your unfounded bullshit. Thirdly, you are getting very close to libel and I know that the moderators take a dim view of such things on the site.
I take this thread as evidence.
Mods: if you disagree, please ban me.
So still nothing specific then? You can produce no evidence to backup your claims. I'll ask one last time. Produce any specific words or wording that I have written where I say women are inferior to men or retract your statement. I've given you three very fair chances to do so, last time of asking to do either one.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
Show me where you've said you think women are equal to men, or, heaven forfend, better than men. As for your question: I'd say this entire thread is you excusing disparities between men and women.
As for legal action: that's lawfare, isn't it? And you *hate* that.
Burden of proof is on you - he clearly didn't say that. You're obviously in the wrong - just apologise and move on?
As I said, this entire thread indicates that's his thinking. I'd particularly point out where he said that he would freeze a program at 70/30 in favour of men.
If mods think I've gone too far, they can ban me. I've never been banned before, and it'd feel odd to be banned for that, given everything else I've said.
You said a stupid thing. It was clearly wrong and unfounded. All you have to do is show your socially aware feminine side, and be the big man, and apologise
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%.
Unfortunately that's not how it sounded or was reported. Had she said "we'll aim to reduce by 90% by 2045" let's say it would have sounded earnest and credible but instead she spent most of her speech taking potshots at her political opponents and blethering on about what couldn't be done rather than what could.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
Show me where you've said you think women are equal to men, or, heaven forfend, better than men. As for your question: I'd say this entire thread is you excusing disparities between men and women.
As for legal action: that's lawfare, isn't it? And you *hate* that.
Firstly, you've made a specific accusation against me, the burden of proof rests upon you to back that up with specific evidence, you have failed on three occasions to do so only offering generic statements and nothing concrete or specific. Secondly, I literally said in the following post that I do not believe women or girls inferior to men in any way, even though I shouldn't have to defend myself from your unfounded bullshit. Thirdly, you are getting very close to libel and I know that the moderators take a dim view of such things on the site.
I take this thread as evidence.
Mods: if you disagree, please ban me.
So still nothing specific then? You can produce no evidence to backup your claims. I'll ask one last time. Produce any specific words or wording that I have written where I say women are inferior to men or retract your statement. I've given you three very fair chances to do so, last time of asking to do either one.
I give this entire thread as 'evidence'.
(edit)
Still nothing specific then I guess. Well you can't say I didn't give you a fair chance to retract your false accusations against me.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
To argue that you have to believe women and men would think the same if you took nurture out. I am far from convinced that this is the case. There is much psychology suggesting men process more visually for example than women and women are more empathy orientated. Perhaps why there are significantly less female serial killers than men for example and pretty sure plenty of women have had the sort of nurture that leads men into serial killing, probably worse in fact
Which is why I am strongly supportive of Lucy Letby(’s guilt)! We need to balance those numbers and reduce the underrepresentation of women in serial killing. /s
Bardella has been polled alongside Le Pen as a potential RN candidate for the French Presidential election and in round 1 he does about as well as Marine - perhaps 2-3 points weaker. As to how he would fare in a second round run off against Edouard Philippe, we don't know.
Were he to be elected, Bardella would probably be the youngest French Head of State like Napoleon Bonaparte.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
@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.
(Snip)
I know of women who quite liked being one of only two girls in a class of 18 boys. They got a much better choice.
Though the phrase I remember was "the odds may be good, but the goods are odd".
For those interested in the actual data, here's a report from the IOP. Over a decade old, but I don't think there's much changed since.
The situation is a bit less bad in indy schools, but even there girls get put off studying physics by the presence of boys.
Why is it only a concern for employment that is male dominated but not female dominated?
It isn’t. There are fields of work that are female dominated where there is an acknowledged imbalance that society would benefit from being addressed. Elderly social care for example, where men get feedback as being less condescending. But particularly primary school teaching.
At my children’s school there were always one or two male teachers, but now my youngest daughter is in year 6 and the men have gone. They really miss them.
But nature is nature and I think it would be mad to argue there aren’t inbuilt differences in how males and females enjoy different things. The secret is to avoid the ideological dead ends that argue we need to either enforce a strictly traditional separation of roles or insist on equal representation in all occupations.
It's worth noting that enjoying doing something and being good at it are not necessarily synonymous.
I've always enjoyed fiddling about with computers and, about 20 years ago, was happily working as a C++ developer. My missus, on the other hand, wasn't particularly into computers or software although she had a technical role as a research scientist. However, there came a point where she also needed to do some coding for work, likewise in C++. To my surprise, she took to it like a duck to water, quickly becoming highly proficient. It's just that she saw it as a work thing, rather than a way of life like my nerdy self.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
Show me where you've said you think women are equal to men, or, heaven forfend, better than men. As for your question: I'd say this entire thread is you excusing disparities between men and women.
As for legal action: that's lawfare, isn't it? And you *hate* that.
Firstly, you've made a specific accusation against me, the burden of proof rests upon you to back that up with specific evidence, you have failed on three occasions to do so only offering generic statements and nothing concrete or specific. Secondly, I literally said in the following post that I do not believe women or girls inferior to men in any way, even though I shouldn't have to defend myself from your unfounded bullshit. Thirdly, you are getting very close to libel and I know that the moderators take a dim view of such things on the site.
I take this thread as evidence.
Mods: if you disagree, please ban me.
So still nothing specific then? You can produce no evidence to backup your claims. I'll ask one last time. Produce any specific words or wording that I have written where I say women are inferior to men or retract your statement. I've given you three very fair chances to do so, last time of asking to do either one.
I give this entire thread as 'evidence'.
(edit)
Still nothing specific then I guess. Well you can't say I didn't give you a fair chance to retract your false accusations against me.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
LOL. Go on, try it. You’d be pouring money down the drain.
If the PM - or indeed this forum - is really interested in stopping violence against women, might I politely suggest that a TV fictional drama about a 13 year old killer is of less use than actual facts and evidence from 2000 real cases involving real women over a number of years.
Oh - and schools have a duty to ensure that material used in classrooms is appropriate. They are not there to provide publicity for a commercial TV company.
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.
Does this count the refugees who will be fleeing the USA, as they did for example from the Europe of the 20s/30s, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East in the 1970s? There will a Usonian diaspora.
In parallel news, Belgian Universities are opening new research positions for academics who want to leave the USA:
Universities should look to recruit researchers fleeing the U.S. amid dramatic funding cuts by the Trump administration because it could help protect vital scientific expertise from being lost, according to the rector of a leading Belgian university.
Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) has announced a host of new postdoctoral positions for international academics, stating that the institution “particularly welcomes excellent researchers currently working in the U.S. which see their line of research threatened. ... VUB and its sister university Université Libre de Bruxelles are offering a total of 36 grants to researchers with a maximum of eight years of postdoctoral experience, funded by the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. The positions are not exclusively designed for U.S.-based researchers, VUB rector Jan Danckaert stressed, but are “open to all incoming researchers, whatever their nationality or their working place at the moment outside of Belgium.” ... “We also hear from colleagues in the United States that they are applying a kind of self-censorship in order to stay under the radar,” he said. “We believe that freedom of investigation is now under threat in the U.S https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/2025/03/28/rector-recruiting-us-scholars-can-protect-threatened-research
It's one part of the whirlwind MAGA will be reaping. In the words of Dr Fiona Hill, whose interviww I linked a couple of days ago, she thinks the USA are slaughtering the golden science research goose by defunding academia. International investment in the likes of Ivy League financial instruments will flee (no I did not know they existed).
@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.
I think your single sex schools theory is correlation, not causation. Selective schools are much more likely to draw disproportionately from girls who go on to perform well in STEM subject assuming their entrance exams were anything like what I sat all those years ago. It's a failing of the test that it doesn't play to the strength of girls rather than it proving that single sex schools will help get girls into STEM subjects from my perspective.
I'd like to see how the data looks if you limit it to non-selective single sex state schools only but there's probably not enough of those. Even then it would need to be controlled for girls who go to selective schools in the area because entrance exams are, IMO, geared towards boys or at least aptitude tests that play to boys' strengths rather than girls' strengths.
Well, it's easy enough to tell if it's correlation or causation: we simply need to look at selective schools which are mixed (like grammar schools).
If they have significantly higher proportions of female pupils that take hard sciences, then that plays more to the nature side. On the other hand, if they look more regular non-selective schools, then that plays towards environmental factors playing a role.
There are also a significant number of non-selective girls schools in the UK. One can look at them too.
@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.
(Snip)
I know of women who quite liked being one of only two girls in a class of 18 boys. They got a much better choice.
Though the phrase I remember was "the odds may be good, but the goods are odd".
For those interested in the actual data, here's a report from the IOP. Over a decade old, but I don't think there's much changed since.
The situation is a bit less bad in indy schools, but even there girls get put off studying physics by the presence of boys.
Why is it only a concern for employment that is male dominated but not female dominated?
It isn’t. There are fields of work that are female dominated where there is an acknowledged imbalance that society would benefit from being addressed. Elderly social care for example, where men get feedback as being less condescending. But particularly primary school teaching.
At my children’s school there were always one or two male teachers, but now my youngest daughter is in year 6 and the men have gone. They really miss them.
But nature is nature and I think it would be mad to argue there aren’t inbuilt differences in how males and females enjoy different things. The secret is to avoid the ideological dead ends that argue we need to either enforce a strictly traditional separation of roles or insist on equal representation in all occupations.
That was the point I was making, yes there is some nurture involved but male brains and female brains have different strengths, note not inferior, but ones that push them in different directions. I think a feminist even wrote a book about it once...men are from mars women are from venus.
I think everyone man or woman should have full opportunity to progress in a career that attract them, I have worked with many women and never had a problem indeed. Objecting to the gender mix however all other things being equal implies you think they think the same, I suspect the truth is most women think like women...most men think like men....the crossovers are the ones that end up in careers dominated by the opposite sex
“Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” was written by a man. He is very critical of feminism.
With regard to the headline, and with all due deference to Sunil, the comedian Paul Sinha has just observed that "Le Pen is not mightier than the Fraud".
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
If the PM - or indeed this forum - is really interested in stopping violence against women, might I politely suggest that a TV fictional drama about a 13 year old killer is of less use than actual facts and evidence from 2000 real cases involving real women over a number of years.
Oh - and schools have a duty to ensure that material used in classrooms is appropriate. They are not there to provide publicity for a commercial TV company.
Netflix had the chance to do that, yet the changed the facts of the case they used as inspiration to tell a more engaging but ultimately false story that will end up being used as a catalyst for probably the wrong change. Again, as a society we need to understand why it is that young men are finding so much solace with the likes of Andrew Tate and other women hating personalities. If all we do is try and ban Andrew Tate it won't solve anything because 5 more will pop up within seconds, we need to make it so that young men recognise and understand that Andrew Tate and others like him aren't the answer to their problems, I don't know how we do it but it definitely starts with an honest conversation about how society has changed over the last 20 years for boys and men.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
Yes indeed. As @williamglenn notes, @JosiasJessop is actually projecting, onto you, his male chauvinist perception that *traditionally* female roles are somehow inferior to those of men
I have two children, both daughters. I am very glad they are both growing up in societies that allow women maximum freedom to choose any career they like; at the same time if they choose more traditionally female roles I will not see that as evidence they have been penalized by the patriarchy (they haven’t, they’re probably lucky they are female, these days), nor will I see their chosen roles as ‘inferior”
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.
Ed Davey on the hard left?
Come on - Ed Davey is an orange booker, and wrote the chapter on "Liberalism and localism". It isn't so long since he was being called a Tory by some on the left, and was in coalition with the Cons at cabinet level.
I think you are a Conservative? If the blues are getting their Overton Window this far out of whack, it's no wonder they are still up a creek without a paddle.
Even I agree Davey is centrist economically and socially liberal not hard left
@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.
(Snip)
I know of women who quite liked being one of only two girls in a class of 18 boys. They got a much better choice.
Though the phrase I remember was "the odds may be good, but the goods are odd".
For those interested in the actual data, here's a report from the IOP. Over a decade old, but I don't think there's much changed since.
The situation is a bit less bad in indy schools, but even there girls get put off studying physics by the presence of boys.
Why is it only a concern for employment that is male dominated but not female dominated?
It isn’t. There are fields of work that are female dominated where there is an acknowledged imbalance that society would benefit from being addressed. Elderly social care for example, where men get feedback as being less condescending. But particularly primary school teaching.
At my children’s school there were always one or two male teachers, but now my youngest daughter is in year 6 and the men have gone. They really miss them.
But nature is nature and I think it would be mad to argue there aren’t inbuilt differences in how males and females enjoy different things. The secret is to avoid the ideological dead ends that argue we need to either enforce a strictly traditional separation of roles or insist on equal representation in all occupations.
That was the point I was making, yes there is some nurture involved but male brains and female brains have different strengths, note not inferior, but ones that push them in different directions. I think a feminist even wrote a book about it once...men are from mars women are from venus.
I think everyone man or woman should have full opportunity to progress in a career that attract them, I have worked with many women and never had a problem indeed. Objecting to the gender mix however all other things being equal implies you think they think the same, I suspect the truth is most women think like women...most men think like men....the crossovers are the ones that end up in careers dominated by the opposite sex
“Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” was written by a man. He is very critical of feminism.
Yes made the assumption was due to my ultra feminist girlfriend praising the book, never read it just assumed as she was pushing it at me
Just found, thanks to a good chap on X, the 1982 BBC version of An Inspector Calls in IPlayer. It’s rather good.
It cewrtainly is. And if you are interested, Radio 4 Extra currently has all three of JB Priestley's "Time" plays on the talking wireless. Well worth hearing.
Recruitment agents who scam foreign nationals applying to work in the UK care sector have been exposed by BBC secret filming.
One of the rogue agents is a Nigerian doctor who has worked for the NHS in the field of psychiatry.
The Home Office has acknowledged the system is open to abuse, but the BBC World Service's investigation shows the apparent ease with which these agents can scam people, avoid detection, and continue to profit.
Devising fake payroll schemes to conceal that some jobs do not exist
Shifting from care to other sectors, like construction, that also face staff shortages
Reports of immigration scams have increased since a government visa scheme - originally designed to let foreign medical professionals work in the UK - was broadened in 2022 to include care workers.
...
Our investigation found that Efficiency for Care employed - on average - 16 people in 2022, and 152 in 2023. Yet a letter sent from the Home Office to the company dated May 2023 - and seen by the BBC - showed it had issued 1,234 Certificates of Sponsorship to foreign workers between March 2022 and May 2023.
If the PM - or indeed this forum - is really interested in stopping violence against women, might I politely suggest that a TV fictional drama about a 13 year old killer is of less use than actual facts and evidence from 2000 real cases involving real women over a number of years.
Oh - and schools have a duty to ensure that material used in classrooms is appropriate. They are not there to provide publicity for a commercial TV company.
Netflix had the chance to do that, yet the changed the facts of the case they used as inspiration to tell a more engaging but ultimately false story that will end up being used as a catalyst for probably the wrong change. Again, as a society we need to understand why it is that young men are finding so much solace with the likes of Andrew Tate and other women hating personalities. If all we do is try and ban Andrew Tate it won't solve anything because 5 more will pop up within seconds, we need to make it so that young men recognise and understand that Andrew Tate and others like him aren't the answer to their problems, I don't know how we do it but it definitely starts with an honest conversation about how society has changed over the last 20 years for boys and men.
Again, you are making the rather large jump that the series was based on a 'case'. The people involved appear to say otherwise.
@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.
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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
Show me where you've said you think women are equal to men, or, heaven forfend, better than men. As for your question: I'd say this entire thread is you excusing disparities between men and women.
As for legal action: that's lawfare, isn't it? And you *hate* that.
Firstly, you've made a specific accusation against me, the burden of proof rests upon you to back that up with specific evidence, you have failed on three occasions to do so only offering generic statements and nothing concrete or specific. Secondly, I literally said in the following post that I do not believe women or girls inferior to men in any way, even though I shouldn't have to defend myself from your unfounded bullshit. Thirdly, you are getting very close to libel and I know that the moderators take a dim view of such things on the site.
I take this thread as evidence.
Mods: if you disagree, please ban me.
So still nothing specific then? You can produce no evidence to backup your claims. I'll ask one last time. Produce any specific words or wording that I have written where I say women are inferior to men or retract your statement. I've given you three very fair chances to do so, last time of asking to do either one.
The challenges raised by Adolescence aren't something we can simply legislate for — if I could pull a lever to solve it, I would.
It's only by listening and learning from the experiences of young people and charities that we can tackle this.
That's what I've been doing today.
IT'S A FICTIONAL SHOW YOU UTTER HELMET.
*Starmer not you.
Do you not think that fiction can contain truths about ourselves and society? Do you see no value in fiction beyond mere entertainment?
Shakespeare's Richard III is fiction, but it's a hell of a lot closer to reality than much of the supposedly factual nonsense pumped out by the Richard III Society.
@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.
They fuck you up your mum and dad.
Only if you believe nurture is the be all and end all.
If it was people with similar upbringings would all go on to be serial killers and assorted criminals, most dont most go on to be good citizens
@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.
(Snip)
I know of women who quite liked being one of only two girls in a class of 18 boys. They got a much better choice.
Though the phrase I remember was "the odds may be good, but the goods are odd".
For those interested in the actual data, here's a report from the IOP. Over a decade old, but I don't think there's much changed since.
The situation is a bit less bad in indy schools, but even there girls get put off studying physics by the presence of boys.
Why is it only a concern for employment that is male dominated but not female dominated?
It isn’t. There are fields of work that are female dominated where there is an acknowledged imbalance that society would benefit from being addressed. Elderly social care for example, where men get feedback as being less condescending. But particularly primary school teaching.
At my children’s school there were always one or two male teachers, but now my youngest daughter is in year 6 and the men have gone. They really miss them.
But nature is nature and I think it would be mad to argue there aren’t inbuilt differences in how males and females enjoy different things. The secret is to avoid the ideological dead ends that argue we need to either enforce a strictly traditional separation of roles or insist on equal representation in all occupations.
That was the point I was making, yes there is some nurture involved but male brains and female brains have different strengths, note not inferior, but ones that push them in different directions. I think a feminist even wrote a book about it once...men are from mars women are from venus.
I think everyone man or woman should have full opportunity to progress in a career that attract them, I have worked with many women and never had a problem indeed. Objecting to the gender mix however all other things being equal implies you think they think the same, I suspect the truth is most women think like women...most men think like men....the crossovers are the ones that end up in careers dominated by the opposite sex
“Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” was written by a man. He is very critical of feminism.
Yes made the assumption was due to my ultra feminist girlfriend praising the book, never read it just assumed as she was pushing it at me
The other thing worth knowing about the author, John Gray, is that he’s really into transcendental meditation.
Just found, thanks to a good chap on X, the 1982 BBC version of An Inspector Calls in IPlayer. It’s rather good.
It cewrtainly is. And if you are interested, Radio 4 Extra currently has all three of JB Priestley's "Time" plays on the talking wireless. Well worth hearing.
@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.
(Snip)
I know of women who quite liked being one of only two girls in a class of 18 boys. They got a much better choice.
Though the phrase I remember was "the odds may be good, but the goods are odd".
For those interested in the actual data, here's a report from the IOP. Over a decade old, but I don't think there's much changed since.
The situation is a bit less bad in indy schools, but even there girls get put off studying physics by the presence of boys.
Why is it only a concern for employment that is male dominated but not female dominated?
It isn’t. There are fields of work that are female dominated where there is an acknowledged imbalance that society would benefit from being addressed. Elderly social care for example, where men get feedback as being less condescending. But particularly primary school teaching.
At my children’s school there were always one or two male teachers, but now my youngest daughter is in year 6 and the men have gone. They really miss them.
But nature is nature and I think it would be mad to argue there aren’t inbuilt differences in how males and females enjoy different things. The secret is to avoid the ideological dead ends that argue we need to either enforce a strictly traditional separation of roles or insist on equal representation in all occupations.
That was the point I was making, yes there is some nurture involved but male brains and female brains have different strengths, note not inferior, but ones that push them in different directions. I think a feminist even wrote a book about it once...men are from mars women are from venus.
I think everyone man or woman should have full opportunity to progress in a career that attract them, I have worked with many women and never had a problem indeed. Objecting to the gender mix however all other things being equal implies you think they think the same, I suspect the truth is most women think like women...most men think like men....the crossovers are the ones that end up in careers dominated by the opposite sex
“Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” was written by a man. He is very critical of feminism.
Yes made the assumption was due to my ultra feminist girlfriend praising the book, never read it just assumed as she was pushing it at me
The other thing worth knowing about the author, John Gray, is that he’s really into transcendental meditation.
@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.
My non-professional field, military history, is overwhelmingly male, not I think, because women are unwelcome, (and there are excellent military historians who are women), but because it just attracts far more men than women, as a subject.
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
But how much of that is nature versus nurture? How much intrinsically our nature, and how much taught behaviour?
And that's the big question.
I'd like you to retract your statement please or I'll ask the moderators to intervene. You have, IMO, made unfounded accusations against me.
Without repeating (difficult, I know), which statement? PM me if mecressary.
Where you wrongly accused me of saying women are inferior to men.
"It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution."
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
Please then could you point our where I specifically said that women were or are "inferior" to men. I'm seriously considering legal action at this point, there are a few people who read this website that know my real identity.
Show me where you've said you think women are equal to men, or, heaven forfend, better than men. As for your question: I'd say this entire thread is you excusing disparities between men and women.
As for legal action: that's lawfare, isn't it? And you *hate* that.
Firstly, you've made a specific accusation against me, the burden of proof rests upon you to back that up with specific evidence, you have failed on three occasions to do so only offering generic statements and nothing concrete or specific. Secondly, I literally said in the following post that I do not believe women or girls inferior to men in any way, even though I shouldn't have to defend myself from your unfounded bullshit. Thirdly, you are getting very close to libel and I know that the moderators take a dim view of such things on the site.
I take this thread as evidence.
Mods: if you disagree, please ban me.
So still nothing specific then? You can produce no evidence to backup your claims. I'll ask one last time. Produce any specific words or wording that I have written where I say women are inferior to men or retract your statement. I've given you three very fair chances to do so, last time of asking to do either one.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer
@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
"The argument though is not women are inferior..."
Oh, there are plenty of dog-whistles towards that.
"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."
I have commented several times on the primary schools situation, and that boys with single parents (almost always mothers) are unlikely to get a male role model at primary school. But AIUI the upper levels - head teachers - are more likely to be male, even if the teaches are predominately female. But perhaps that has changed...
I've also commented that I saw an all-female surveying team a year or so ago. That warmed my cockles.
Surveying isn't hard brutal labour like brick laying......how many female bricklayers are there and do you we think we do need to do more to encourage more woman to become brick layers.....pretty sure the answer will be no
I think the answer is yes.
And I've done surveying. And a tiny bit of bricklaying. And both can be brutal and physical - certainly compared to flipping bits.
Like lorry driving, bricklaying is becoming *less* physically demanding. In ye olden days, a lorry driver would have no power steering, and mostly do not need to lift heavy boxes to offload. In bricklaying, you don't need to climb ladders with heavy brick hods on your shoulder (*); the telehandler delivers the bricks to you on the second floor.
As an aside, I recently saw roof trusses being delivered *and positioned on the roof* straight from the delivery lorry. No putting them on the ground in between. My flabber was ghasted.
(*) Which was often the apprentice's job...
I don't know about lorry driving but there are a great many women driving buses now, owing first to power steering and more recently perhaps to the abolition of cash fares in London (and free travel for kids) which means less aggro with passengers.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer
Also dont forget the better pensions most software engineers might get 5% from there firm as mandated by law....doctors and nurses will be getting 20% +
Recruitment agents who scam foreign nationals applying to work in the UK care sector have been exposed by BBC secret filming.
One of the rogue agents is a Nigerian doctor who has worked for the NHS in the field of psychiatry.
The Home Office has acknowledged the system is open to abuse, but the BBC World Service's investigation shows the apparent ease with which these agents can scam people, avoid detection, and continue to profit.
Devising fake payroll schemes to conceal that some jobs do not exist
Shifting from care to other sectors, like construction, that also face staff shortages
Reports of immigration scams have increased since a government visa scheme - originally designed to let foreign medical professionals work in the UK - was broadened in 2022 to include care workers.
...
Our investigation found that Efficiency for Care employed - on average - 16 people in 2022, and 152 in 2023. Yet a letter sent from the Home Office to the company dated May 2023 - and seen by the BBC - showed it had issued 1,234 Certificates of Sponsorship to foreign workers between March 2022 and May 2023.
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
Give it a few years 'On average, a GP partner takes home approximately £110,000.' Whereas 'The estimated total pay for a Senior Software Engineer is £73,305 per year'
@Keir_Starmer As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.
We all need to be having these conversations more.
I've backed Netflix's plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, so as many young people as possible can see it.
It is based on the true case of Hassan Sentamu who killed a girl under similar circumstances. The writers have since denied that but a very god friend of mine in the industry has said that it was the case they drew almost all of their inspiration from. Other than the race of the lead character, of course.
Because white (or even Indian...) boys never kill anyone?
Don't put words in my mouth. I just find it odd that they basically copied this particular case, all except the race and religion of the actual guilty party. It's almost as though the writers have an agenda. But I guess they can fall back on the "inspired by" and simpletons will believe them.
The creators have specifically said that they chose a white boy and a “non problematic” Everyman family specifically to get the message across that this could be anyone’s child - it’s not just young black boys and boys from broken homes with absent fathers.
Haven’t watched it so I don’t know if that works or not but it was a fair point by them to try and have maximum effect - they are unapologetic about the series having an agenda - stopping young boys being radicalised/marginalised and turning to violence.
But if you look at the actual crime metrics it is boys from problem families and single parent families that are responsible for a huge part of this kind of crime and hatred.
Society has rapidly gone from telling boys that they're great and can achieve anything to telling them that they're usless, that girls are better, that they're all hyperactive and need to be medicated. It's no surprise that internet personalities that tell them that they're not any of those things and that being masculine isn't bad are all getting lots of airtime with young boys and teenagers. We have feminised society to such an extend that boys are rebelling against that, even girls are beginning to do so (see Gen Z women coming out for Trump).
Maybe what we need to ask ourselves is why boys are finding solace in these parts of the internet and what we, as a society, have done to drive them into the arms of men who clearly hate women? I guess that's too much work and instead we'll try and ban Andrew Tate and play whack-a-mole with all of the people who pop up to replace him.
I look at my industry as an example, we have about a dozen "women in tech" programmes that I've been to which is great for women but there's loads of men who graduate and have relevant skills that are struggling too. Women now achieve higher levels of education, have higher employment in their early 20s and have higher overall wages in the early years of their careers. We've done well to help women into the workplace but at the same time we're still pushing on that accelerator despite all of the evidence that women have now caught up and over taken men in the workplace for the younger generations. We're creating a new issue and it's going to have horrible consequences 10 years from now.
Which company do you work for? If not wanting to give a name, give a sector.
At your level/grade, what percentage of women are there? Have they 'caught up', or are they still behind in terms of numbers?
Ah I'm currently unemployed, but I work in the tech sector, specifically within data science.
It's not my grade that matters for men in the late teens and early 20s, no one is becoming a VP of Data or CDO at that age. I'm talking about all of the graduate programmes and job fairs that specifically help women into the workplace, they've been hugely successful. I literally opened a programme for it at one of my previous workplaces when I was in investment management so we could increase the number of female grads in our intake we went from 90/10 to around 70/30 by the time I left. Though as I did so I recommended that the company freeze or close the programme because any further than that and they really would be taking substandard female candidates over vastly better qualified male ones. Even at 70/30 there was a lot of favouritism towards the women in the process, they got to skip a panel interview and got a 1 on 1 interview instead, they got a much lower pressure home task rather than the live case study the male candidates had to do and we had a lower entry bar on the aptitude test all candidates had to sit to enter into the process.
I've literally been there and done it, I've walked the walk on helping women into male dominated work places. I'm suggesting that it's probably time to take stock and look at where we are and maybe not push down on the accelerator for it. I don't see how it's controversial.
The Alan Turing Institute says women make up 22% of AI and data professionals. So, I'd suggest a bit of a way to go...
You go an speak to 100 girls aged 13-16 and find me more than 22 who give any fucks about computing, maths or software engineering/coding. That's the issue, girls don't give any fucks about it and it's difficult to then recruit from a smaller pool without excluding better qualified male candidates.
Girls in single sex schools typically take further maths/science/computer science at much higher rates than in mixed schools.
So a decent amount of the gap is caused by our education system (and girls preferring to be in classes with lots of other girls) rather than innate desire.
Related to this, we dropped the panel interview for women and replaced it with a stakeholder/peer interview with a senior female manager for a similar reason to this effect.
However, and it's a big one, there is an innate geekiness that boys have which isn't replicated among anywhere near the same number of girls. What percentage of girls do you think have changed the graphics card in their computer before the age of 16? What percentage of girls have booted their computers into safe mode by the same age? For boys the numbers will be seriously high, I mean when we discovered that if we booted the school PCs into safe mode the content filtering didn't initialise everyone learned how to do it.
I might suggest that if you were to take 50 5-year old boys, and 50 5-year old girls, and take them through how to change a graphics card in a computer, you would get the same success rate regardless of their gender. Because too many kids at a slightly older age are being told "that's a man's job".
If you were to ask what percentage of girls could sew up some torn jeans, you might get an expectedly corresponding result, for similar reasons. "This is a man's role" "This is a woman's role"
It's all bullshit.
When I had dinner with Princess Anne (*), we talked about nature versus nurture. It was a fascinating conversation, that covered multi-generational aspects. Which is a little worrying, as it infers it might take multiple generations to fix. If, indeed, you think it needs fixing...
(*) Gratuitous name drop
My nephew is 3 years old (almost 4) and all he wants to do is play with Lego, take everything apart to see how it works and destroy/rebuild his lego towers. He has had identical upbringing and literally identical toys as my niece who is two years older, she has substantially less interest in Lego, she likes to listen to stories, loves anything about dragons, princes and saving the princess - even shit that I've made up on the spot. My sample size of two says you don't know what you're talking about. Girls are simply less innately interested in building, spatial science and maths just as boys are innately less interested in linguistics and socialising. It's literally a million years of accumulated evolution.
When given a selection of human toys, very young chimpanzees will select them thus: the tiny male chimps pick up the toy cars and trains and make them “do things”, the tiny female chimps pick up little dolls and role play, with more emotion
Yes, some sex differences are innate
Source, please.
There are multiple studies. Here is one
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
A bit further down the evolutionary chain and yet there's a truth there that modern society would prefer to sweep away.
Anybody who has been a parent simply knows this is true. Boy babies gravitate towards tools and wheels and weapons. Sticks to fight with, toy trucks to go “vroom vroom”.
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
Yes, what JJ doesn't realise is that he's actually buying into the Andrew Tate narrative that "men's careers" are inherently superior to "women's careers" when that is absolutely not the case. Both choices are equally valid and we would, as a society, breakdown if women didn't make the career choices they do and go into medicine, teaching and nursing. The idea that a woman is inferior because she prefers to be a nurse, doctor or teacher rather than a software engineer or crypto trader is frankly laughable.
No, I'm really not buying into that.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
None of them earn much different to a software engineer except a doctor or a crypto leader median salary for a developer is 58k and falling currently. Doctors and crypto leaders earn much more. This is also for senior software developers and senior nurses and teachs arent more than a few k different
Graduate software engineer UK: £37,150 to £40,158 per year Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year. Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
A doctor gets paid more for that as they get shift work allowances to etc and their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer
I was earning more than that as a (non)-graduate software engineer nearly thirty years ago.
"their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer"
Elon Musk started off as a software engineer. Just sayin'.
And pity the hardware engineers. What price hand-soldering surface-mount resistors onto a PCB?
@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.
I think your single sex schools theory is correlation, not causation. Selective schools are much more likely to draw disproportionately from girls who go on to perform well in STEM subject assuming their entrance exams were anything like what I sat all those years ago. It's a failing of the test that it doesn't play to the strength of girls rather than it proving that single sex schools will help get girls into STEM subjects from my perspective.
I'd like to see how the data looks if you limit it to non-selective single sex state schools only but there's probably not enough of those. Even then it would need to be controlled for girls who go to selective schools in the area because entrance exams are, IMO, geared towards boys or at least aptitude tests that play to boys' strengths rather than girls' strengths.
Well, it's easy enough to tell if it's correlation or causation: we simply need to look at selective schools which are mixed (like grammar schools).
If they have significantly higher proportions of female pupils that take hard sciences, then that plays more to the nature side. On the other hand, if they look more regular non-selective schools, then that plays towards environmental factors playing a role.
There are also a significant number of non-selective girls schools in the UK. One can look at them too.
And the numbers are in (for Physics A Level, data is from 2013, but I'd be staggered if it had changed much):
Mixed State School: 2.7% of girls Mixed Grammar School: 6.2% Girls Private School: 11.9% Single Sex Grammar School: 13.2%
It suggests that societal pressures are a significant contributor to low uptake of the sciences. (I do need to check boys numbers throughout. What would be really interesting would be if boys uptake of Physics was lower in single sex schools than in mixed ones.)
Comments
If you get people debating the respective merits of the longbow and the composite bow, online, 95% of them will be male.
Yes, some sex differences are innate
I'd like to see how the data looks if you limit it to non-selective single sex state schools only but there's probably not enough of those. Even then it would need to be controlled for girls who go to selective schools in the area because entrance exams are, IMO, geared towards boys or at least aptitude tests that play to boys' strengths rather than girls' strengths.
And that's the big question.
He has no bell.
Oh, there are plenty of dog-whistles towards that.
"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."
I have commented several times on the primary schools situation, and that boys with single parents (almost always mothers) are unlikely to get a male role model at primary school. But AIUI the upper levels - head teachers - are more likely to be male, even if the teaches are predominately female. But perhaps that has changed...
I've also commented that I saw an all-female surveying team a year or so ago. That warmed my cockles.
“Sex differences in chimpanzees' use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children”
“when presented with sex-stereotyped human toys, captive female monkeys play more with typically feminine toys, whereas male monkeys play more with masculine toys”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982210014491
For those interested in the actual data, here's a report from the IOP. Over a decade old, but I don't think there's much changed since.
https://www.iop.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/its-different-for-girls.pdf
The situation is a bit less bad in indy schools, but even there girls get put off studying physics by the presence of boys.
And I've done surveying. And a tiny bit of bricklaying. And both can be brutal and physical - certainly compared to flipping bits.
Like lorry driving, bricklaying is becoming *less* physically demanding. In ye olden days, a lorry driver would have no power steering, and mostly do not need to lift heavy boxes to offload. In bricklaying, you don't need to climb ladders with heavy brick hods on your shoulder (*); the telehandler delivers the bricks to you on the second floor.
As an aside, I recently saw roof trusses being delivered *and positioned on the roof* straight from the delivery lorry. No putting them on the ground in between. My flabber was ghasted.
(*) Which was often the apprentice's job...
Or this entire conversation thread.
Not retracted.
I've pointed out before on here that there should be more male primary school teachers. Including on this thread, I think.
Or are those equating more men in a role as women being inferior for that role?
Obviously, the US has now dropped theirs. Targets vary from country to country in terms of what they cover and the target year, but many are also for 2050, including the EU, Chile, Colombia, South Korea, Australia, Japan, Singapore and Brazil. Some are for even earlier, namely Germany and Nepal aiming for 2045.
At my children’s school there were always one or two male teachers, but now my youngest daughter is in year 6 and the men have gone. They really miss them.
But nature is nature and I think it would be mad to argue there aren’t inbuilt differences in how males and females enjoy different things. The secret is to avoid the ideological dead ends that argue we need to either enforce a strictly traditional separation of roles or insist on equal representation in all occupations.
As for legal action: that's lawfare, isn't it? And you *hate* that.
Modern industrial society is... about 200 years old? There is no way that is meaningfully affecting evolution yet. Indeed, a lot of our problems as a society come from the fact that we're cavemen in suits.
You're obviously in the wrong - just apologise and move on?
That change suggests to me that there’s no innate gender difference to ability to do statistics. It’s just that the culture once pushed people one way and now goes the other way.
I haven't seen figures to see if the disparity between teachers and heads continues.
But to take this to a serious point: nature versus nurture fascinates me.
Mods: if you disagree, please ban me.
I think everyone man or woman should have full opportunity to progress in a career that attract them, I have worked with many women and never had a problem indeed. Objecting to the gender mix however all other things being equal implies you think they think the same, I suspect the truth is most women think like women...most men think like men....the crossovers are the ones that end up in careers dominated by the opposite sex
Girl babies gravitate towards dolls and story-telling and dressing up things
This is not always true, but it is true enough to be commonly observable
Which is what you’d expect from a species where - for 98% of our evolution - males have done the fighting and building and “engineering”, and female have done the nursing and child rearing and social bonding. Men are attuned to potential outgroup threats, women are attuned to ingroup social safety and empathy and bonding. Why? Because men are big and strong and they do the fighting, or building, and women are smaller and weaker but linguistically more capable and emotionally aware, so they knit the family/band together
One is not inferior or superior to the other, that is a ludicrous statement. It’s like saying the singer is more important than the musician in a musical duo. They cannot exist without the other, they are different but equally vital
Likewise, this does not mean that all men must be builders or fighters, or that all women must be carers or nurses, some men will make superb nurses, some women will be superb engineers, and all must be treated equally AND given equal opportunity. But ignoring these innate differences and enforcing a 50/50 split in every profession is insane, and damaging
*puts hands in pockets and whistles innocently*
Come on - Ed Davey is an orange booker, and wrote the chapter on "Liberalism and localism". It isn't so long since he was being called a Tory by some on the left, and was in coalition with the Cons at cabinet level.
I think you are a Conservative? If the blues are getting their Overton Window this far out of whack, it's no wonder they are still up a creek without a paddle.
If mods think I've gone too far, they can ban me. I've never been banned before, and it'd feel odd to be banned for that, given everything else I've said.
(edit)
Bardella has been polled alongside Le Pen as a potential RN candidate for the French Presidential election and in round 1 he does about as well as Marine - perhaps 2-3 points weaker. As to how he would fare in a second round run off against Edouard Philippe, we don't know.
Were he to be elected, Bardella would probably be the youngest French Head of State like Napoleon Bonaparte.
But taking your examples, it's odd how a 'nurse, doctor or teacher' tends to earn less than a 'software engineer' or 'crypto trader'.
And software engineering is somewhere I'd expect there to be zero difference between men and women, even given millions of years of evolution. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper being two interesting cases of where women could make a big mark *before* it became popular.
I've always enjoyed fiddling about with computers and, about 20 years ago, was happily working as a C++ developer. My missus, on the other hand, wasn't particularly into computers or software although she had a technical role as a research scientist. However, there came a point where she also needed to do some coding for work, likewise in C++. To my surprise, she took to it like a duck to water, quickly becoming highly proficient. It's just that she saw it as a work thing, rather than a way of life like my nerdy self.
The PM 's political priorities are seemingly influenced by the TV programmes he's watched or retired TV presenters he) talked to.
Meanwhile in the real world, this - https://www.femicidecensus.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/2000-Women-full-report.pdf - an analysis of the 2000 completed cases of women killed by men between 2009 and 2023. The key findings are on page 15. This is the information about the 1,992 male perpetrators.
If the PM - or indeed this forum - is really interested in stopping violence against women, might I politely suggest that a TV fictional drama about a 13 year old killer is of less use than actual facts and evidence from 2000 real cases involving real women over a number of years.
Oh - and schools have a duty to ensure that material used in classrooms is appropriate. They are not there to provide publicity for a commercial TV company.
In parallel news, Belgian Universities are opening new research positions for academics who want to leave the USA:
Universities should look to recruit researchers fleeing the U.S. amid dramatic funding cuts by the Trump administration because it could help protect vital scientific expertise from being lost, according to the rector of a leading Belgian university.
Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) has announced a host of new postdoctoral positions for international academics, stating that the institution “particularly welcomes excellent researchers currently working in the U.S. which see their line of research threatened.
...
VUB and its sister university Université Libre de Bruxelles are offering a total of 36 grants to researchers with a maximum of eight years of postdoctoral experience, funded by the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. The positions are not exclusively designed for U.S.-based researchers, VUB rector Jan Danckaert stressed, but are “open to all incoming researchers, whatever their nationality or their working place at the moment outside of Belgium.”
...
“We also hear from colleagues in the United States that they are applying a kind of self-censorship in order to stay under the radar,” he said. “We believe that freedom of investigation is now under threat in the U.S
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/2025/03/28/rector-recruiting-us-scholars-can-protect-threatened-research
It's one part of the whirlwind MAGA will be reaping. In the words of Dr Fiona Hill, whose interviww I linked a couple of days ago, she thinks the USA are slaughtering the golden science research goose by defunding academia. International investment in the likes of Ivy League financial instruments will flee (no I did not know they existed).
If they have significantly higher proportions of female pupils that take hard sciences, then that plays more to the nature side. On the other hand, if they look more regular non-selective schools, then that plays towards environmental factors playing a role.
There are also a significant number of non-selective girls schools in the UK. One can look at them too.
I have two children, both daughters. I am very glad they are both growing up in societies that allow women maximum freedom to choose any career they like; at the same time if they choose more traditionally female roles I will not see that as evidence they have been penalized by the patriarchy (they haven’t, they’re probably lucky they are female, these days), nor will I see their chosen roles as ‘inferior”
Recruitment agents who scam foreign nationals applying to work in the UK care sector have been exposed by BBC secret filming.
One of the rogue agents is a Nigerian doctor who has worked for the NHS in the field of psychiatry.
The Home Office has acknowledged the system is open to abuse, but the BBC World Service's investigation shows the apparent ease with which these agents can scam people, avoid detection, and continue to profit.
Our secret filming reveals agents' tactics, including:
Illegally selling jobs in UK care companies
Devising fake payroll schemes to conceal that some jobs do not exist
Shifting from care to other sectors, like construction, that also face staff shortages
Reports of immigration scams have increased since a government visa scheme - originally designed to let foreign medical professionals work in the UK - was broadened in 2022 to include care workers.
...
Our investigation found that Efficiency for Care employed - on average - 16 people in 2022, and 152 in 2023. Yet a letter sent from the Home Office to the company dated May 2023 - and seen by the BBC - showed it had issued 1,234 Certificates of Sponsorship to foreign workers between March 2022 and May 2023.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1en4dx7yn9o
"Evening All".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DGPuwery8s
If it was people with similar upbringings would all go on to be serial killers and assorted criminals, most dont most go on to be good citizens
Graduate nurse UK: £29,969 per year
Graduate doctor UK: £32,398 to £37,303 per year
Graduate crypto leader salary UK: £35,785 per year.
Graduate crypto trader UK: £30,000 to £50,000
All from Google. Okay, those last two surprised me. And it makes me wonder quite what a 'Graduate crypto leader' role comprises ...
So a graduate software engineer, at the bottom end, earns the top end a doctor does. As I said, this is from Google, and actual jobs may vary.
Absolute state of this country when it comes to migration.
It’s hard not to have any sympathy for the people, like the man in the story, who was exploited.
Or for that matter the Nigerians who came over to be prison officers and ending up sleeping in cars as there was no accomodation provided.
https://www.medical-interviews.co.uk/topic/gp-partnerships#:~:text=On average, a GP partner,of England (£120,000).
https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/senior-software-engineer-salary-SRCH_KO0,24.htm
"their career top end is a lot higher than the graduate software engineer"
Elon Musk started off as a software engineer. Just sayin'.
And pity the hardware engineers. What price hand-soldering surface-mount resistors onto a PCB?
Mixed State School: 2.7% of girls
Mixed Grammar School: 6.2%
Girls Private School: 11.9%
Single Sex Grammar School: 13.2%
It suggests that societal pressures are a significant contributor to low uptake of the sciences. (I do need to check boys numbers throughout. What would be really interesting would be if boys uptake of Physics was lower in single sex schools than in mixed ones.)