[Joe G.]

Originally Posted by The Swaggy P

Alright.
I'm going to stray from my original intention of simply pointing out the massive difference in lunch discussions at the IndyRAGE event, and move on to something I've noticed a lot in recent posts.

Most of the females talking about not getting into high-paying jobs because of male dominance, are mainly talking about jobs like Engineering, software design, business management, etc.

But none of the aforementioned females pointed out that more women should be involved in male-dominated jobs such as: Oil drilling, Mining, Sheetrock Layers, or any "Down & Dirty" Jobs that possess similar pay.

I find this to be unfair to the male population, for if you are pushing for equal rights, in order to get females into office-based jobs like the ones mentioned above, you should also be pushing for more in the physical labor.

You are literally on a discussion board about a program aimed to get people into engineering and sofware development fields, in a thread about an event specifically aimed to achieve this. Of course that's what everyone is going to be discussing.

Already talked about this.

So get upset about this! Do something about it! People are missing out on the opportunity to gain fulfilling employment right now, time is of the essence! Start a program to encourage male Kindergarten teachers, and eradicate the perception that men working with young children are automatically sexual predators! Create initiatives to remove sexist barriers to entry and cultural normalization of dirty, hands on work as "a man's job." But that sounds like work, and it's easier to complain about people actually taking these initiatives in other fields. It'd take real passion and concern for these issues, rather than only caring about them for the purposes of an internet argument in favor of the status quo...

The fact is, every heavily skewed datapoint on that graph, in both directions, are simply symptoms of the same, much larger problem: That people refuse to acknowledge that artificial societal pressures and factors generate these uneven distributions rather than some innate biological reality of gender, that in doing so, people reinforce those societal elements that created the disparities in the first place, and that no matter how you cherry-pick careers, these societal pressures are overwhelmingly sexist and present women as generally "less capable." STEM is an attractive field, with very obvious benefactors from gender equality movements, and so it gets a lot of focus. I mean, we're on a discussion board about a nationwide program to get more people inspired by this career -- I doubt you could find a similarly sized "For Inspiration and Recognition of Garbage Collectors," regardless of gender focus. But maybe victories here, and breaking down barriers and perceptions here, can help inpart change across the board. We don't only encourage women in STEM to get women in STEM, we do it because it's a part of the bigger picture in the fight against the patriarchy.

Sidenote, but when did this trend of replacing the word "women" with "females" happen? It might be just me, but it sounds incredibly demeaning and almost dehumanizing, especially since it never goes the other way.