Rather than getting into the issue of who was more dominant in a field at a given time, let's look at another field. Literally all early psychologists were men. Today the field is about 70% women with a rapidly increasing "gender gap." Do you think that's because 'men are discouraged from entering the field by society'? Of course not. Should we start trying to 'correct' this? Again, of course not. We should of course always ensure that men and women have equality of opportunity to do as they see fit, but differences in outcome alone do not mean anything.
Scandinavia is the most gender equal region in the world. And one of the many discoveries they made on the way there is that when there is a major push to get people into atypical roles there tends to be a roughly constant increase in participation. After that push fades everything rapidly converges back to where it was before. The constant aspect is also interesting in that it seems to suggest there is no self feedback mechanism as would be implied by simple social differences causing a change.
Some of the biggest companies for trying to get 'x into computing', including women, have been Google, Apple, and Intel. These are the exact same companies that were also engaging in an illegal anti-competitive collusion cartel whereby the agreed to not try to recruit each employees from one another. They were fully aware of the consequences of this action. Eric Schmidt of Google ironically wrote in an email, "[discussion of this agreement should be done] verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later." [2]
As Schmidt was well aware of the possibility of, they've now faced losses at trial in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So why would these companies voluntarily engage in such a high risk behavior? Because it kept wages down. What does pushing for 'get x into computing' do? It would markedly increase the labor pool without a proportional increase in the number of jobs. It would help drive wages substantially down.
Do you think that's because 'men are discouraged from entering the field by society'? Of course not
Since I'm not in that field, I really have no first hand knowledge, but if I had to guess, maybe men are encouraged to go into psychiatry instead of psychology while women are discouraged from becoming a psychiatrist?
What does pushing for 'get x into computing' do? It would markedly increase the labor pool without a proportional increase in the number of jobs. It would help drive wages substantially down.
The more important thing it does is bring additional talented people in the field, making it easier to hire top quality people.
It's not about making it "easier" to hire top quality people, but cheaper. Easier would imply that companies such as Google, Apple, and Intel are simply unable to hire enough top quality engineers. That's clearly false. It might also suggest that the engineers that they have are insufficiently skilled - again something I see no evidence for at all. But we are certainly at the equilibrium where supply and demand are in a nice balance. This is unlike most other fields where labor supply has greatly outpaced demand in part due to college becoming as typical as high school. And because of this engineers at these companies are in positions of unprecedented privilege. They can actively try to influence corporate policy, demand wages that in many cases are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and so on.
The idea of increasing the supply is to bring the equilibrium in line with most other industries which is where labor supply generally greatly outpaces business demand. This not only helps drive wages down, but also enables companies greater control over their employee. For instance in tech there is massive turnover. Since employees are in high demand, they can and do job hop much to their own benefit. When employees are less in demand a job becomes more sacred which increases employee "loyalty" giving the company more power to do as they see fit. As but one example employees are going to be less inclined to object to dubious corporate behavior, which has become a running theme at Google, when said employees attach an extremely high value to their job.
What would happen however is that no-name shops who can't offer all that much would be able to hire top quality people. And while that's good for them, I see this no better than the current state of the job market where it's increasingly common to see that the guy serving your coffee has a college degree, and the mountain of debt that entails. Labor oversupply benefits companies and hurts employees. In a 'big picture' view, this is probably a good thing since marginalizing labor means more companies can grow and compete which benefits everybody in the longrun. But from the perspective of labor, it's obviously not a good thing.
Scandinavia is the most gender equal region in the world. And one of the many discoveries they made on the way there is that when there is a major push to get people into atypical roles there tends to be a roughly constant increase in participation. After that push fades everything rapidly converges back to where it was before. The constant aspect is also interesting in that it seems to suggest there is no self feedback mechanism as would be implied by simple social differences causing a change.
Some of the biggest companies for trying to get 'x into computing', including women, have been Google, Apple, and Intel. These are the exact same companies that were also engaging in an illegal anti-competitive collusion cartel whereby the agreed to not try to recruit each employees from one another. They were fully aware of the consequences of this action. Eric Schmidt of Google ironically wrote in an email, "[discussion of this agreement should be done] verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later." [2]
As Schmidt was well aware of the possibility of, they've now faced losses at trial in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So why would these companies voluntarily engage in such a high risk behavior? Because it kept wages down. What does pushing for 'get x into computing' do? It would markedly increase the labor pool without a proportional increase in the number of jobs. It would help drive wages substantially down.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_n...
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