Ms. Wu, you don't know me, but I'm a woman in tech.
I admit that I have been harassed in my career. Sexually, by men. But by women also, where the weapon of choice was rumor and innuendo.
So you see, men and women are equal, in that they are perfectly capable of cruelty towards others.
All that having been said, you will not, during the course of a normal workday, ever hear me talk about being a woman.
Know why?
Because my job is not dependent upon being a woman. It depends upon me being able to do my job, and last I checked, being able to communicate, use a computer, or design a test does not automatically somehow reject me from the process of doing my job or make it harder.
Yes, there is sexism, I will not deny this, but it isn't pervasive, it isn't everywhere, and you'll never find me pointing at shadows demanding everyone within the sound of my voice do something about some formless terror that in the course of damn near a year hasn't become as corporeal as, say, Ferguson, or Charleston, or the Bill Cosby controversy.
Because it doesn't help anyone.
YOU are the one creating a hostile environment by stirring up this imagined "terror" of Gamergate, and demanding this wild snipe hunt be enacted to purge no one in particular, and scare everyone to varying degrees.
YOU are the one saying that the environment hates women so much that you need to create a "safe space" for women around you to the exclusion of men, and yet somehow find yourself "qualified" to decry sexism.
YOU are the one reacting defensively to questions by even the most neutral of submitters.
People actually like me because I'm not all about gender politics, at least not until women like YOU show up and demand to be taken seriously and I have to tread carefully, so people don't think I want to be part of your crusade...because, fuck, I just want to do my job and get along with my coworkers.
So, here's a proposition for you: if you want it to stop being about sexism, how about you stop talking about sexism?
If you want people to take you seriously, don't sidetrack the discussion into other subjects.
If you want people not to question your credibility, avoid questions about the things you don't want to talk about and answer questions about the things you do, and DO NOT WAVER. Give people the impression that the only subjects you'll entertain are the ones that make you credible in the field. Make sure they know you don't have time for the bullshit that ISN'T about game development.
That is how I am successful, Ms. Wu, and Slashdot. That is how many women I know, peers and mentors, have been successful. Not by being a woman first and a developer/engineer/career whatever second.
I'll not be cynical for the moment and ask you to emulate those women. Not the ones whose valuable time is spent glossing over the few individuals who have wronged you because I guarantee, there weren't that many.
I hope you take this advice, Ms. Wu, because I think that's what a good feminist would do.
If your priority is to raise a child, then what your time is NOT spent doing is paying your dues.
It's not sexist for you to say that if you take yourself out of the loop for an insignificant amount of time for ANY reason (say, a two-year sabbatical because you were burned out, for instance), then you don't get to claim that you've been working for two years.
This is me acknowledging how important raising children is, by the way: they need your time enough that unless you have a support system in place for raising the kid that consists of more than just you and one other person, or the one other person is invested in raising that kid on a full-time basis, your career - including research on the latest and greatest in whatever your field is - takes a back seat and that makes you a decent parent.
But to say it's somehow a "crime" to make the choice to put your career on hold? Please.
I was in the awkward position of explaining to the board of a church why young people don't join religious organizations anymore, and it has far less to do with resigning from belief systems than you might think.
When you have a thing called a career in the very "grownup" sort of way, you're expected to make friends with the people you work with. One organization I worked for had the expectation that you'd come to the corporate-sponsored "networking" events it held after hours (same one believed you were an employee 24/7/365 and expected you to act accordingly), and if you were lucky, you got to play golf, or smoke cigars or go out to dinner, or do whatever high-level muckety-mucks do to grease palms away from the vulgar business meetings the rest of us grunts need to attend for show.
What you're supposed to do, then, is maintain relationships on a near constant basis with the people you work with. You're supposed to play the political game with them, day and night, and then this whole "church" thing comes up, and you're supposed to not only attend services, but attend fundraisers, and volunteer to lend a hand with holiday parties and do maintenance work and take part in group meetings and all that sort of stuff.
So, then you're responsible for a second group of friends for whom you maintain good relationships by doing all the extracurriculars that they do as well.
Most young people, even extroverts, can't argue with the idea of wanting a little time to themselves, and maintaining a second social life, when their primary one is so demanding* is almost completely out of the question these days.
*What makes this more sinister is the fact that if you build your life around that job as they expect you to, it's an even bigger emotional toll if they eventually fire you.
Not all of us are lucky enough to know what our calling is when we're kids. Or we have other circumstances to deal with that keep us from finding it.
If you manage to angle yourself to the career you want at 45 because it wasn't feasible at 25, I daresay you might be the more interesting (note that I did not say "more qualified") candidate. You may bring more workplace experience and maturity, and even a little bit more common sense. And probably more drive to do the job, seeing as how the world works like hell to incentivize fresh, young people and could give a flying fuck about people returning to school after some years in the workforce.
That's what makes me really sad, the fact that changing careers is so prohibitive that many people stay the course and be miserable rather than take a chance on what might make them happy, and all because they didn't get the lucky breaks that other kids get.
This. Although for some odd reason there are, I've heard, some employers (a nonzero number and increasing) that insist on not only having access to your Facebook account ""so they can get hold of you at any time"
There...there are people that believe this?
That's like saying you should hand over the keys to your house. Disregarding the miserable lack of privacy, it also makes the unreasonable assumption you'll be home all the time.
No. The person I originally replied to claimed that the Founding Fathers would be ashamed of allowing some of the nastier elements of Reddit to exist, as if they were somehow so holy that they never would have engaged in that kind of behavior (or in some cases, worse).
What I'm saying is that given the proclivities of the Founding Fathers, which were of varying levels of moral (in addition to a good number of the men themselves being involved in wars and the horrors occurring therein), I don't think they'd need a fainting couch about the worst corners of Reddit.
Yes, I wasn't about to get into evolutionary psych, which is why I kind of brushed it off.
Talking in evo psych is a double-edged sword. On one hand, you have a narrative that fits the facts and sets a biological basis for the differences between men and women, and if you can scientifically prove it's sound, then okay.
However, if you can't (or are debating with someone who refuses to listen, or is going the "special snowflake" route with the argument), then what you end up with is more of a self-perpetuating argument for feminism ("I need feminism because social engineering in this direction will counteract the social engineering put in place by The Patriarchy"). Never minding the women (and men) who have made choices throughout history that counteract all the social engineering they've had to endure even to the death because...personal proclivities? Biology? Trauma? Something else that causes wide divergence in "accepted" gender roles?
What explains those people? Beats me, but it seems to me they didn't need any positive -ism when there wasn't any kind of -ism to prop it up or any overwhelming negative -ism to beat it back.
I admit, I'm largely turned off by the "designed for girls" tag. Desensitized, really, since I'm over the age of 30 and have been inundated by this sort of thing for a quarter of a century.
(I know you're an AC and won't respond, but for the benefit of those who have continued reading, I've met with more than one coach who's tried to woo me into joining his gym with "women's classes", so, yes, this sort of thing happens to adults as well.)
I also remember not having pink Legos while growing up, because my plastic Lego tote didn't come with any. I wasn't terribly troubled by this, of course. Because I didn't have to be told that something was for girls. Without labeling, I was fine to establish whether or not it was for me.
Again, this was 25 years ago. I doubt children have changed that much in that amount of time.
I try to ride my bike as often as possible, but it turns my commute from 25 minutes to a solid hour. Which is the least of my problems with it, by the way. I certainly don't mind the exercise.
I've ridden in about 40 deg F temperatures before, that's certainly possible, but even in fair and forgiving weather, drivers around here are absolute psychos: despite "share the road" signs, most people regard them as "I'll share as long as they're not delaying me an inconvenient 30 seconds into my turn-off" (and yes, that's literally how long you'd have to wait if you were behind me). They will tailgate you, and find someone to complain to about you. Other drivers not involved in the altercation will tell you you shouldn't have been in that lane.
Never mind how drivers around here treat other drivers. If you drive the limit on a lot of roads, it's almost an offense to other drivers who just have to be where they're going a little bit faster - thus a lot of tailgating and passing, even on roads where it's not legal to do so. Despite the fact that the abundance of stop signs and traffic lights around here more or less equalizes all of those speed demons to those of us going the limit. It's better than even a shot that if you blow past me, I'll eventually catch up to you because you're caught at a light until I get there.
To get back onto the point of this discussion: I've been on metro systems in big cities, which are...okay if you're doing a day-trip and you plan your day around it. Unfortunately, I live in a rural area that doesn't really accommodate that sort of thing and would require much more time and effort just to do.
So, when I can, I ride my bike, but drivers aren't a big fan of that, either. All they seem to want is expanding their personal space and personal comfort as much as possible without regard for other people. And are willing to pay far, far more money to do that.
People would go in for free, or for minimized costs (see the costs of bike maintenance, if you're not willing to do that yourself) if it wasn't a cost to "me, me, me".
Khan was played by a Mexican in the original series. I get what you're saying, but if we're going to talk about "correctness", let's talk about how correct the original was in the first place.
And why does anyone care if a film passes the Bechdel test? It was written as a joke and is about an arbitrary a standard as how much swearing is in a movie.
And people keep forgetting that any classic series is a reflection of the time in which it's created. That's why reboots are markedly different from the original and don't often capture the original spirit...because the people doing the rebooting don't know what it's like to have the spirit that created it. Not that I agree with reboots in general, but original fans should understand that reboots really aren't made for them (the minority) but for, as you say, the masses.
Maybe they're not interested in the current workforce dominated by males with sexist attitudes and L337 approaches?
Citation needed that the world is actually like this, please. I see this assertion everywhere with no evidence whatsoever to back it up.
When engineering projects are made that catter to the specific differences and interests of females (such as toy construction sets that are less centered on their pure mechanical structure and more on their usage and applications, [kickstarter.com]) the approval rate of girls towards is shown to increase. (The pink color seems to help in this case, BTW). This may very well a chicken-and-egg problem: women are not interested in science and tech because nowadays there's nothing interesting in it for them.
Nowadays?
People are interested in what they are interested in. They'll gravitate towards the things they fancy. If they don't want Legos, pink or otherwise, they'll find something else to do. That's the way it's always been.
I admit I don't know the full effect of a thing being pink has on girls in general, but on girls who are actually interested in building things, the color hardly matters because the desire to build is greater than having a pink thing. I daresay that the girls who treated the Legos with colorblindness are the ones that will eventually turn out to be the engineers that we so very much want girls to be in the first place, and the ones who chose the pink ones just wanted pink things because they were pink.
If your "empirical evidence" is mindless repeating of gender stereotypes, you lose an internet. Where's the connection that STEM people must be "risk-takers" (or that women don't do outrageous things, for that matter)?
Well, see your first statement. You lose one, too.
STEM is seen as "high-risk" because it's regarded as a harder field to succeed in. "Harder" is generally associated with "higher risk". How hard is that to understand?
No one is saying women don't do outrageous things. It's that they do them in far lesser numbers than men do. I can't tell you why, to be honest. But find me an arena where women are more dominant in doing outrageous things than men. The only one I can think of is Roller Derby, which coincidentally, doesn't really have a "male" component, does it?
I constantly have to explain to people that the contents of my camping kit are far more lethal than anything my 3D printer produces. Just my camping knife or tent pegs would be enough to kill someone if properly applied. Even my carbon-fiber-toed boots could cause serious injury if I kicked someone hard enough.
I suppose I could veer towards the absurd and assess that I should worry about being arrested if I should ever go camping again, but I have nothing to worry about in than regard, right? RIGHT?!?!
I have a few certifications myself (Agile, CEH, DoD Acquisition...strangely, I don't have a PMP, but I've seriously considered it), and while I could tell you that those are bare-minimum and not worth nearly as much as I paid for them, I'm not going to say they don't have their uses.
Some companies, particularly ones aligned with the Government, DO require them rather strictly. It's not fair, and frankly, I think a lot of those bare-minimum ones shouldn't be considered worthwhile as "resume" material because they're so basic (they're really like saying you went to high school when you're presenting yourself as the holder of a Bachelor's Degree...the implication of learning the basics is pretty much built-in).
That said, there are intangible things that they do offer, like networking or getting you out of the office for a week or two, maybe teaching you something new or something you didn't consider before. If the cert isn't something that you were necessarily inclined to do in the first place, it may give you a new perspective on how to deal with people (as stated, I considered taking the PMP because I'm not a strong communicator when it comes to management; spending time around more "managerial" types may actually help me).
That also said, a lot of these companies know for a fact that it's a bare-minimum requirement, so organizations like PMI, DAU and EC-Council that have a foot in the door with the Government have curricula that basically writes them a blank check. It's obscene, in some respects, since a lot of the learning should really be on-the-job training as part of orientation to the internal culture of a place. I get the idea of an across-the-board minimum standard, and that's fine, but it shouldn't be used as a substitute for internal training.
Do you want to know how the women who is making $200K a year got that kind of salary? The answer is simple: She didn't stop looking until she found it.
This may be the most sensible thing said in this entire thread.
You don't get a six-figure job without hustle. Hustle indicates that you were out for that job, you were looking for it, you knew where to find it, and you did your homework to be able to locate the job and then have the capability to do it when you got there.
The person that earns that kind of money a year wasn't discovered in a drugstore waiting in line to buy a bottle of aspirin. That person positioned themselves so that they could get that kind of job all day, every day, for years. And here we are, arguing that "not nearly enough women" get that kind of opportunity because they weren't shown enough of the "right" advertisements.
I'd say the plenty of the right women (and men) get that kind of opportunity because they damn well knew how to find it for themselves, and frankly, deserve it more than anyone who thinks that something like that should just fall into their lap by chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Ms. Wu, you don't know me, but I'm a woman in tech.
I admit that I have been harassed in my career. Sexually, by men. But by women also, where the weapon of choice was rumor and innuendo.
So you see, men and women are equal, in that they are perfectly capable of cruelty towards others.
All that having been said, you will not, during the course of a normal workday, ever hear me talk about being a woman.
Know why?
Because my job is not dependent upon being a woman. It depends upon me being able to do my job, and last I checked, being able to communicate, use a computer, or design a test does not automatically somehow reject me from the process of doing my job or make it harder.
Yes, there is sexism, I will not deny this, but it isn't pervasive, it isn't everywhere, and you'll never find me pointing at shadows demanding everyone within the sound of my voice do something about some formless terror that in the course of damn near a year hasn't become as corporeal as, say, Ferguson, or Charleston, or the Bill Cosby controversy.
Because it doesn't help anyone.
YOU are the one creating a hostile environment by stirring up this imagined "terror" of Gamergate, and demanding this wild snipe hunt be enacted to purge no one in particular, and scare everyone to varying degrees.
YOU are the one saying that the environment hates women so much that you need to create a "safe space" for women around you to the exclusion of men, and yet somehow find yourself "qualified" to decry sexism.
YOU are the one reacting defensively to questions by even the most neutral of submitters.
People actually like me because I'm not all about gender politics, at least not until women like YOU show up and demand to be taken seriously and I have to tread carefully, so people don't think I want to be part of your crusade...because, fuck, I just want to do my job and get along with my coworkers.
So, here's a proposition for you: if you want it to stop being about sexism, how about you stop talking about sexism?
If you want people to take you seriously, don't sidetrack the discussion into other subjects.
If you want people not to question your credibility, avoid questions about the things you don't want to talk about and answer questions about the things you do, and DO NOT WAVER. Give people the impression that the only subjects you'll entertain are the ones that make you credible in the field. Make sure they know you don't have time for the bullshit that ISN'T about game development.
That is how I am successful, Ms. Wu, and Slashdot. That is how many women I know, peers and mentors, have been successful. Not by being a woman first and a developer/engineer/career whatever second.
I'll not be cynical for the moment and ask you to emulate those women. Not the ones whose valuable time is spent glossing over the few individuals who have wronged you because I guarantee, there weren't that many.
I hope you take this advice, Ms. Wu, because I think that's what a good feminist would do.
I wasn't implying that pay should be commensurate with age.
More that education to get there is prohibitive.
Otherwise, I agree with you.
No it isn't.
If your priority is to raise a child, then what your time is NOT spent doing is paying your dues.
It's not sexist for you to say that if you take yourself out of the loop for an insignificant amount of time for ANY reason (say, a two-year sabbatical because you were burned out, for instance), then you don't get to claim that you've been working for two years.
This is me acknowledging how important raising children is, by the way: they need your time enough that unless you have a support system in place for raising the kid that consists of more than just you and one other person, or the one other person is invested in raising that kid on a full-time basis, your career - including research on the latest and greatest in whatever your field is - takes a back seat and that makes you a decent parent.
But to say it's somehow a "crime" to make the choice to put your career on hold? Please.
Oh, stop messin' around.
You know perfectly well that Slashdotters are basement-dwelling neckbeards that can't have wives.
On the other hand, you probably still live with your mother...okay, problem solved.
(Sorry, did I just say something that creates an unsafe space for men? And is that okay, because I'm a guy pretending to be a woman on the internet?)
It's even worse nowadays.
I was in the awkward position of explaining to the board of a church why young people don't join religious organizations anymore, and it has far less to do with resigning from belief systems than you might think.
When you have a thing called a career in the very "grownup" sort of way, you're expected to make friends with the people you work with. One organization I worked for had the expectation that you'd come to the corporate-sponsored "networking" events it held after hours (same one believed you were an employee 24/7/365 and expected you to act accordingly), and if you were lucky, you got to play golf, or smoke cigars or go out to dinner, or do whatever high-level muckety-mucks do to grease palms away from the vulgar business meetings the rest of us grunts need to attend for show.
What you're supposed to do, then, is maintain relationships on a near constant basis with the people you work with. You're supposed to play the political game with them, day and night, and then this whole "church" thing comes up, and you're supposed to not only attend services, but attend fundraisers, and volunteer to lend a hand with holiday parties and do maintenance work and take part in group meetings and all that sort of stuff.
So, then you're responsible for a second group of friends for whom you maintain good relationships by doing all the extracurriculars that they do as well.
Most young people, even extroverts, can't argue with the idea of wanting a little time to themselves, and maintaining a second social life, when their primary one is so demanding* is almost completely out of the question these days.
*What makes this more sinister is the fact that if you build your life around that job as they expect you to, it's an even bigger emotional toll if they eventually fire you.
That right there is age discrimination, though.
Not all of us are lucky enough to know what our calling is when we're kids. Or we have other circumstances to deal with that keep us from finding it.
If you manage to angle yourself to the career you want at 45 because it wasn't feasible at 25, I daresay you might be the more interesting (note that I did not say "more qualified") candidate. You may bring more workplace experience and maturity, and even a little bit more common sense. And probably more drive to do the job, seeing as how the world works like hell to incentivize fresh, young people and could give a flying fuck about people returning to school after some years in the workforce.
That's what makes me really sad, the fact that changing careers is so prohibitive that many people stay the course and be miserable rather than take a chance on what might make them happy, and all because they didn't get the lucky breaks that other kids get.
Well, sure, while I don't support this rationale, I have no trouble believing that happens.
I'm having trouble believing the GP's assertion that the rationale given is for emergency contact purposes.
This. Although for some odd reason there are, I've heard, some employers (a nonzero number and increasing) that insist on not only having access to your Facebook account ""so they can get hold of you at any time"
There...there are people that believe this?
That's like saying you should hand over the keys to your house. Disregarding the miserable lack of privacy, it also makes the unreasonable assumption you'll be home all the time.
No. The person I originally replied to claimed that the Founding Fathers would be ashamed of allowing some of the nastier elements of Reddit to exist, as if they were somehow so holy that they never would have engaged in that kind of behavior (or in some cases, worse).
What I'm saying is that given the proclivities of the Founding Fathers, which were of varying levels of moral (in addition to a good number of the men themselves being involved in wars and the horrors occurring therein), I don't think they'd need a fainting couch about the worst corners of Reddit.
Indeed. No mod points, but you said it better than I could.
The same Founding Fathers that owned slaves and being so imperfect likely held what we would probably consider politically incorrect beliefs?
For instance, I have no trouble believing that Benjamin Franklin was, in the common parlance, an "incorrigible poon-hound".
So, even if they didn't engage in that sort of behavior, I'm sure they at least ribbed each other with a joke or two of the variety.
I daresay they may have even had a good laugh about this sort of thing if they could see it.
We also didn't have 'free speech zones', 'safe places', a culture of taking offense at absolutely everything, etc.
We didn't?
So, what you're telling me is that pearl-clutching is a new phenomenon?
"Statistics" isn't cool enough, and since it doesn't have "science" or "mathematics" in the name, it doesn't fit into the acronym "STEM".
And you can't invoke the mighty need for "STEM" if you have to make people think about how it's related.
Yes, I wasn't about to get into evolutionary psych, which is why I kind of brushed it off.
Talking in evo psych is a double-edged sword. On one hand, you have a narrative that fits the facts and sets a biological basis for the differences between men and women, and if you can scientifically prove it's sound, then okay.
However, if you can't (or are debating with someone who refuses to listen, or is going the "special snowflake" route with the argument), then what you end up with is more of a self-perpetuating argument for feminism ("I need feminism because social engineering in this direction will counteract the social engineering put in place by The Patriarchy"). Never minding the women (and men) who have made choices throughout history that counteract all the social engineering they've had to endure even to the death because...personal proclivities? Biology? Trauma? Something else that causes wide divergence in "accepted" gender roles?
What explains those people? Beats me, but it seems to me they didn't need any positive -ism when there wasn't any kind of -ism to prop it up or any overwhelming negative -ism to beat it back.
I admit, I'm largely turned off by the "designed for girls" tag. Desensitized, really, since I'm over the age of 30 and have been inundated by this sort of thing for a quarter of a century.
(I know you're an AC and won't respond, but for the benefit of those who have continued reading, I've met with more than one coach who's tried to woo me into joining his gym with "women's classes", so, yes, this sort of thing happens to adults as well.)
I also remember not having pink Legos while growing up, because my plastic Lego tote didn't come with any. I wasn't terribly troubled by this, of course. Because I didn't have to be told that something was for girls. Without labeling, I was fine to establish whether or not it was for me.
Again, this was 25 years ago. I doubt children have changed that much in that amount of time.
Or because she was a hateful, sociopathic, gaslighting asshole before being a woman?
I try to ride my bike as often as possible, but it turns my commute from 25 minutes to a solid hour. Which is the least of my problems with it, by the way. I certainly don't mind the exercise.
I've ridden in about 40 deg F temperatures before, that's certainly possible, but even in fair and forgiving weather, drivers around here are absolute psychos: despite "share the road" signs, most people regard them as "I'll share as long as they're not delaying me an inconvenient 30 seconds into my turn-off" (and yes, that's literally how long you'd have to wait if you were behind me). They will tailgate you, and find someone to complain to about you. Other drivers not involved in the altercation will tell you you shouldn't have been in that lane.
Never mind how drivers around here treat other drivers. If you drive the limit on a lot of roads, it's almost an offense to other drivers who just have to be where they're going a little bit faster - thus a lot of tailgating and passing, even on roads where it's not legal to do so. Despite the fact that the abundance of stop signs and traffic lights around here more or less equalizes all of those speed demons to those of us going the limit. It's better than even a shot that if you blow past me, I'll eventually catch up to you because you're caught at a light until I get there.
To get back onto the point of this discussion: I've been on metro systems in big cities, which are...okay if you're doing a day-trip and you plan your day around it. Unfortunately, I live in a rural area that doesn't really accommodate that sort of thing and would require much more time and effort just to do.
So, when I can, I ride my bike, but drivers aren't a big fan of that, either. All they seem to want is expanding their personal space and personal comfort as much as possible without regard for other people. And are willing to pay far, far more money to do that.
People would go in for free, or for minimized costs (see the costs of bike maintenance, if you're not willing to do that yourself) if it wasn't a cost to "me, me, me".
Khan was played by a Mexican in the original series. I get what you're saying, but if we're going to talk about "correctness", let's talk about how correct the original was in the first place.
And why does anyone care if a film passes the Bechdel test? It was written as a joke and is about an arbitrary a standard as how much swearing is in a movie.
And people keep forgetting that any classic series is a reflection of the time in which it's created. That's why reboots are markedly different from the original and don't often capture the original spirit...because the people doing the rebooting don't know what it's like to have the spirit that created it. Not that I agree with reboots in general, but original fans should understand that reboots really aren't made for them (the minority) but for, as you say, the masses.
No mod points, but wanted to nod in agreement.
Sad day for gaming.
RIP, Mr. Iwata.
Maybe they're not interested in the current workforce dominated by males with sexist attitudes and L337 approaches?
Citation needed that the world is actually like this, please. I see this assertion everywhere with no evidence whatsoever to back it up.
When engineering projects are made that catter to the specific differences and interests of females (such as toy construction sets that are less centered on their pure mechanical structure and more on their usage and applications, [kickstarter.com]) the approval rate of girls towards is shown to increase. (The pink color seems to help in this case, BTW). This may very well a chicken-and-egg problem: women are not interested in science and tech because nowadays there's nothing interesting in it for them.
Nowadays?
People are interested in what they are interested in. They'll gravitate towards the things they fancy. If they don't want Legos, pink or otherwise, they'll find something else to do. That's the way it's always been.
I admit I don't know the full effect of a thing being pink has on girls in general, but on girls who are actually interested in building things, the color hardly matters because the desire to build is greater than having a pink thing. I daresay that the girls who treated the Legos with colorblindness are the ones that will eventually turn out to be the engineers that we so very much want girls to be in the first place, and the ones who chose the pink ones just wanted pink things because they were pink.
If your "empirical evidence" is mindless repeating of gender stereotypes, you lose an internet. Where's the connection that STEM people must be "risk-takers" (or that women don't do outrageous things, for that matter)?
Well, see your first statement. You lose one, too.
STEM is seen as "high-risk" because it's regarded as a harder field to succeed in. "Harder" is generally associated with "higher risk". How hard is that to understand?
No one is saying women don't do outrageous things. It's that they do them in far lesser numbers than men do. I can't tell you why, to be honest. But find me an arena where women are more dominant in doing outrageous things than men. The only one I can think of is Roller Derby, which coincidentally, doesn't really have a "male" component, does it?
I constantly have to explain to people that the contents of my camping kit are far more lethal than anything my 3D printer produces. Just my camping knife or tent pegs would be enough to kill someone if properly applied. Even my carbon-fiber-toed boots could cause serious injury if I kicked someone hard enough.
I suppose I could veer towards the absurd and assess that I should worry about being arrested if I should ever go camping again, but I have nothing to worry about in than regard, right? RIGHT?!?!
I should add that I didn't pay for the DoD one.
I have a few certifications myself (Agile, CEH, DoD Acquisition...strangely, I don't have a PMP, but I've seriously considered it), and while I could tell you that those are bare-minimum and not worth nearly as much as I paid for them, I'm not going to say they don't have their uses.
Some companies, particularly ones aligned with the Government, DO require them rather strictly. It's not fair, and frankly, I think a lot of those bare-minimum ones shouldn't be considered worthwhile as "resume" material because they're so basic (they're really like saying you went to high school when you're presenting yourself as the holder of a Bachelor's Degree...the implication of learning the basics is pretty much built-in).
That said, there are intangible things that they do offer, like networking or getting you out of the office for a week or two, maybe teaching you something new or something you didn't consider before. If the cert isn't something that you were necessarily inclined to do in the first place, it may give you a new perspective on how to deal with people (as stated, I considered taking the PMP because I'm not a strong communicator when it comes to management; spending time around more "managerial" types may actually help me).
That also said, a lot of these companies know for a fact that it's a bare-minimum requirement, so organizations like PMI, DAU and EC-Council that have a foot in the door with the Government have curricula that basically writes them a blank check. It's obscene, in some respects, since a lot of the learning should really be on-the-job training as part of orientation to the internal culture of a place. I get the idea of an across-the-board minimum standard, and that's fine, but it shouldn't be used as a substitute for internal training.
Do you want to know how the women who is making $200K a year got that kind of salary? The answer is simple: She didn't stop looking until she found it.
This may be the most sensible thing said in this entire thread.
You don't get a six-figure job without hustle. Hustle indicates that you were out for that job, you were looking for it, you knew where to find it, and you did your homework to be able to locate the job and then have the capability to do it when you got there.
The person that earns that kind of money a year wasn't discovered in a drugstore waiting in line to buy a bottle of aspirin. That person positioned themselves so that they could get that kind of job all day, every day, for years. And here we are, arguing that "not nearly enough women" get that kind of opportunity because they weren't shown enough of the "right" advertisements.
I'd say the plenty of the right women (and men) get that kind of opportunity because they damn well knew how to find it for themselves, and frankly, deserve it more than anyone who thinks that something like that should just fall into their lap by chance.