>You want more women in CS? Make technology look like less of a boy's club at an early age (and leading into tech education) and wait 15 years for the results. I think the Minecraft kids generation will yield some pretty fantastic surprises on that level.
The only way I can make sense of the gender / race quotas for technical positions is that it's a bootstrapping problem: something along the lines of
(i) Women don't want to pursue careers in tech because it's a boys club.
(ii) It's a boy's club because there aren't enough women in tech (i)
(iii) There aren't enough women in tech because women dont want to pursue careers in tech (ii)
Which seems to be an intractable problem without outside interference.
So if you decided that you were willing to make tough sacrifices (or force other people to make tough sacrifices) then you could solve (ii) by forcing/encouraging tech companies to hire more women even if they're less qualified than male candidates and that would solve (i) by making women want to purse careers in tech now that it isn't a boys club which would solve (iii) by changing women more likely to want to pursue careers in tech and (wait several decades) presto now you don't have to discriminate anymore.
That said, I hope you're correct about the Minecraft stuff because that would very conveniently solve the problem without anybody having to do anything they don't already want to (but hoping that problems solve themselves is a bad problem solving strategy).
The only way I can make sense of the gender / race quotas for technical positions is that it's a bootstrapping problem: something along the lines of
(i) Women don't want to pursue careers in tech because it's a boys club.
(ii) It's a boy's club because there aren't enough women in tech (i)
(iii) There aren't enough women in tech because women dont want to pursue careers in tech (ii)
Which seems to be an intractable problem without outside interference.
So if you decided that you were willing to make tough sacrifices (or force other people to make tough sacrifices) then you could solve (ii) by forcing/encouraging tech companies to hire more women even if they're less qualified than male candidates and that would solve (i) by making women want to purse careers in tech now that it isn't a boys club which would solve (iii) by changing women more likely to want to pursue careers in tech and (wait several decades) presto now you don't have to discriminate anymore.
That said, I hope you're correct about the Minecraft stuff because that would very conveniently solve the problem without anybody having to do anything they don't already want to (but hoping that problems solve themselves is a bad problem solving strategy).