You lead off with "I've got mine, Jack - don't bother me with other people's problems". You then claim that inequity needs to be proven, but that your money shouldn't be used to investigate until it's proven. Until you figure out why I disagree with that, don't bother with the quibbling.
You're giving business a lot more credit for efficiency than it deserves. Business tends to aim for satisfactory profits, not maximum profits. There are examples, but typically smaller companies that have to go for the gold. That businesses are missing chances to change the way they do things to increase profit is a quite ordinary claim. If it gets too egregious, something will break. When I was young, big businesses had lots and lots of middle management as a way of establishing a career path to keep white-collar employees encouraged. This broke down in the 80s, when corporate raiders made it clear that this was, for the stockholders, a big waste of money. This wouldn't have happened anywhere near as soon if it had been a lesser waste of money. A claim that a business will pass up increased profits if it would require change is a quite ordinary claim.
Doing new things requires taking risks, and Hollywood is often seriously risk-averse, filming mediocre sequels instead of more original movies that might make a lot more money. It gets worse with many managers and executives, knowing their careers will do better with a series of conventional flops than one experiment that doesn't work. If a studio can get a female director of equal quality to a male director with 20% less salary, that's going to make almost no difference in the cost of the movie, after all, and taking risks to try to get more good movies isn't necessary for the studios to profit. A century of film really doesn't mean that much change, being dominated by a few big players in an insular market. The development of Amazon and Netflix is likely to shake things up , but that's relatively recent.
The viewers determine how many people see movies that are out there, in many theaters and well advertised. That's as far as it goes. They don't determine who gets a chance.
As far as the pillars go, they tend to be from the old days, when there was indeed sexual prejudice. Back when we had authors like C.M. Kornbluth and Andre Norton concealing their genders. Back when Campbell's Arcot-Wade-Morley trilogy mentioned the idea of a female human being once or twice in three books. Back when E.E. Smith described equality of the sexes as fundamental to Civilization, and one of the two most incredibly able humans in the galaxy was a nurse, although an extremely copmetent one. I'm going to nominate LeGuin as a reasonably early female author, highly respected and influential.
Diversity is good, but it's not my main concern. My main concern is equal opportunity. It's hard to think of more equal opportunity by gender than writing, where you can always present yourself as the persona you want. A couple of X chromosomes didn't stop Alice Norton; she just used a pen name. If it turns out that bi Indochinese male writers provide needed diversity to erotica, then the first one to try is going to do well. If I had any talent for it, and wanted to do it, I'd pick a pen name like Diana Howard, and none of my readers would be able to tell from it that I'm an old male software developer. (Heck, I thought Samuel Delany was white for a long time - not for any actual reason, but that all the authors I was aware of were.)
Most jobs don't have that same sort of splendid insulation of what the person is and what the person does, and that's where I start getting concerned. I don't care really if movie directors are predominantly male, as long as women have equal opportunity. I've seen that inequality of outcome is evidence of inequality of opportunity, which is why I want such inequalities investigated.
A loop variable is, well, a loop variable. "i" is readily recognizable as one. It suggests that the variable's role is to iterate through a loop. It's a simple-to-type name for a simple variable.
Fracking isn't drilling through a sponge. It involves drilling through an impervious layer of rock. If fracking is done right (and that can be a pretty big "if"), the nasty stuff will stay under the rock layer.
AI and learn-to-code courses do have an effect on the profession. As tools get better, and more people can do the grunt work, the jobs for good people become more interesting. The easier it is to program, the easier it is to do the hard stuff, and somebody's going to pay good money for the hard stuff that newly became feasible.
I have no idea what the total demand for good developers is, just that it's greater than the supply of good developers.
Also, pay attention to how fast the candidate works. If the candidate just whips it out, then (a) the candidate thinks well in code, or (b) the candidate has done Fizzbuzz about 29 times in the past three months. If the candidate has real problems, then (a) the candidate is having problems with the programming environment or (b) isn't worth hiring.
And what's wrong with "i" as a loop counter in a short loop? It's easy to type and traditionally used. Meaningful variable names are for variables that have a meaning outside the context of the program.
But the idea that physical attraction is a social construct is bullshit.
It is, partly. Standards of beauty have varied over historical times. There are things that haven't changed (preferring smooth skin and symmetrical features) and things that have (preferred breast size).
It's funny how after so many years, homosexuals are accepted as a built in preference, and not a choice, that certain groups of feminists are pretending now that everything is a choice, because you can if you want, raise a child to be a male or female, and if you want you can take a child born with a penis, which the evil world of cisgender would demand that he be called a boy social construct, and by social molding have him identify as both a female, and a lesbian. A female who identifies as a lesbian can have sex with this lesbian with a penis. and not be sexual, but a true lesbian who has never had sex with a male, and is repulsed by males. In the world ot total social construct, that is completely valid - if not quite sane.
You're going to have to define "science fiction" then. Most science fiction includes things that violate our understanding of the Universe. There are the traditional SF science violations that people tend to overlook (FTL, easy space travel, psionic abilities, etc.), but there's no bright-line difference between that and a magic-using society.
FWIW, Alice Norton published under the name Andre Norton. I don't know if she would have done as well under her own name, but she knew the scene back then and thought it wise to have a male pen name. Of course, we're talking about something from my youth, when the Hugo Awards were normally handed out by hadrosaurs.
I suspect you'll find that the actors are also too tall to be period, and probably relatively few women then were as attractive as a B-list actress is now (and check for shaven armpits - that's relatively recent). I don't really care about race. Is there someone besides Samuel Jackson, Jr. who would have done as good a Nick Fury in the Marvel films?
the final battle in the thing making zero sense on... every level...
We watched it when my son was in his pre-teens. When we got home, he discussed all the tactical problems with the battle scene, like they offended him so much he had to get them off his chest. (The big one I remember was about the ground troops to secure the site to drop the bomb.)
We could go with some of the female written science fiction. Care to cite some anyone really cares about?
Does the name Miles Vorkosigan mean anything to you? That won a series Hugo last year for Lois McMaster Bujold, and her Five Gods series is up for consideration this year. Speaking of Hugos, N.K. Jemisin won two novel awards back-to-back for the first two books of her Broken Earth trilogy, and I'm not betting against "Stone Sky" winning the trilogy's third Hugo. Highly recommended. (Hugo winners are of uneven quality. Those two were very well-deserved.)
Really, did you think this question through? I believe Bujold now has more writing Hugos than anyone else, edging out Heinlein.
Where is the moral outcry over the lack of male erotica writers?
And here you have run into one of the most gender-neutral occupations around. A writer can sit at a desk or table and write. A writer can use a pen name of either sex. (Remember Andre Norton?) An erotica writer that appeals to women probably has an edge if female rather than male, due to more personal experience, but this is one of those rare jobs where having a vagina is a relevant qualification.
Stuck in what way? If everybody making significant decisions has rigid gender and race roles, there isn't going to be that much discussion, but that doesn't mean the decision-makers aren't stuck on race and gender? Back a couple of centuries ago, in this country, women weren't allowed to vote. Nice and simple. Then suffragists started making a fuss, and people were concerned about whether women should be allowed to vote. The right to vote wasn't stuck in a gender role, but there was more talk about it.
Has it occurred to you that a "good old boy's network" might control a lot of resources, which will be used to favor men and not women? We know that there was sexism earlier, and wound up with men controlling most of the large assets. This isn't a matter of choice, but rather inequality of opportunity.
This is Slashdot. A request for citations is reasonable, and not complying is reasonable. However, when someone on my side does it, it's "really easy for you to make a horrible accusation". Lighten up.
But as feminism got more influence in the west, women got less happy.
Which, even if true, tells us nothing about what effect feminism has on happiness. The world didn't stand still except for an increase in feminism. Economic inequality has been increasing over that period, for example.
Read the Labor Relations Board finding. Damore didn't get into trouble because of his views. He got into trouble because he was being disruptive with them, pushing them on people. If he'd just left his essay on the place it was intended for, no problem.
Paranoia is not a desirable character trait, and neither is jumping to immutable conclusions with limited evidence.
Which is a product of other cultural expectations. Women are rated on their appearance more than men are. Women's clothing is more expensive and often less durable, and women are actually expected to have color coordination skills. They're often expected to put on make-up. A given degree of first-impression credibility takes a woman more money and time and thought than it takes a man.
Since you mentioned movies, I'll say this. Ghostbusters broke out in the '80s (I presume) and became a huge cultural movie showcasing four men. Recently, it was remade with four women -- why? Because women decided to ruin a classic? Because women couldn't come up with their own content? I don't have the answer.
Here's an answer: because it was really funny. Ghostbusters is not a cinematic classic. It's a very good silly comedy. Men in Hollywood recycle lots of things, so why not women?
You're overthinking this. We don't watch Ghostbusters for the spiritual enlightenment or the consideration of the human condition. We watch it because it's funny. I laughed all through the all-women remake. That's all the justification it needs.
Relax and don't assume that everything's a feminist plot, and you'll be happier.
This notion that the status quo has to be correct is if anything a bigger error.
We have looked at a lot of cases of unequal outcomes, and frequently found unequal opportunity, and reasons for the unequal outcomes. In many cases, we've recognized the reasons as invalid, fixed them, and gotten more equal outcomes.
Men and women are somewhat different, so, given no pressure on the matter, I'd expect to see some fields male-dominated and some female-dominated. I suspect nursing might be preponderantly female even if the problems with becoming a male nurse (and there are specific ones) went away. However, the differences between individuals are usually a lot bigger than those between sexes. (There are exceptions, of course, and I expect topless bar service to be female-dominated.)
This easily leads to the fallacy that, since we've advanced so much, remaining inequalities in outcome are due to actual biologically based differences. It's really easy to look at an inequality, find reasons to explain most or all of it, and stop there, not asking for the reasons behind the reasons. After all, each of us considers himself or herself a good person, and typically perceives other people as good, and finding that stuff we counted on isn't actually the case is uncomfortable.
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You lead off with "I've got mine, Jack - don't bother me with other people's problems". You then claim that inequity needs to be proven, but that your money shouldn't be used to investigate until it's proven. Until you figure out why I disagree with that, don't bother with the quibbling.
You're giving business a lot more credit for efficiency than it deserves. Business tends to aim for satisfactory profits, not maximum profits. There are examples, but typically smaller companies that have to go for the gold. That businesses are missing chances to change the way they do things to increase profit is a quite ordinary claim. If it gets too egregious, something will break. When I was young, big businesses had lots and lots of middle management as a way of establishing a career path to keep white-collar employees encouraged. This broke down in the 80s, when corporate raiders made it clear that this was, for the stockholders, a big waste of money. This wouldn't have happened anywhere near as soon if it had been a lesser waste of money. A claim that a business will pass up increased profits if it would require change is a quite ordinary claim.
Doing new things requires taking risks, and Hollywood is often seriously risk-averse, filming mediocre sequels instead of more original movies that might make a lot more money. It gets worse with many managers and executives, knowing their careers will do better with a series of conventional flops than one experiment that doesn't work. If a studio can get a female director of equal quality to a male director with 20% less salary, that's going to make almost no difference in the cost of the movie, after all, and taking risks to try to get more good movies isn't necessary for the studios to profit. A century of film really doesn't mean that much change, being dominated by a few big players in an insular market. The development of Amazon and Netflix is likely to shake things up , but that's relatively recent.
The viewers determine how many people see movies that are out there, in many theaters and well advertised. That's as far as it goes. They don't determine who gets a chance.
As far as the pillars go, they tend to be from the old days, when there was indeed sexual prejudice. Back when we had authors like C.M. Kornbluth and Andre Norton concealing their genders. Back when Campbell's Arcot-Wade-Morley trilogy mentioned the idea of a female human being once or twice in three books. Back when E.E. Smith described equality of the sexes as fundamental to Civilization, and one of the two most incredibly able humans in the galaxy was a nurse, although an extremely copmetent one. I'm going to nominate LeGuin as a reasonably early female author, highly respected and influential.
Diversity is good, but it's not my main concern. My main concern is equal opportunity. It's hard to think of more equal opportunity by gender than writing, where you can always present yourself as the persona you want. A couple of X chromosomes didn't stop Alice Norton; she just used a pen name. If it turns out that bi Indochinese male writers provide needed diversity to erotica, then the first one to try is going to do well. If I had any talent for it, and wanted to do it, I'd pick a pen name like Diana Howard, and none of my readers would be able to tell from it that I'm an old male software developer. (Heck, I thought Samuel Delany was white for a long time - not for any actual reason, but that all the authors I was aware of were.)
Most jobs don't have that same sort of splendid insulation of what the person is and what the person does, and that's where I start getting concerned. I don't care really if movie directors are predominantly male, as long as women have equal opportunity. I've seen that inequality of outcome is evidence of inequality of opportunity, which is why I want such inequalities investigated.
A loop variable is, well, a loop variable. "i" is readily recognizable as one. It suggests that the variable's role is to iterate through a loop. It's a simple-to-type name for a simple variable.
Fracking isn't drilling through a sponge. It involves drilling through an impervious layer of rock. If fracking is done right (and that can be a pretty big "if"), the nasty stuff will stay under the rock layer.
A lot of UFO encounter stories feature the car just stopping for the duration of the encounter.
In my fifties, what I really needed to do to get job offers was to dye my hair. After that, no problem.
AI and learn-to-code courses do have an effect on the profession. As tools get better, and more people can do the grunt work, the jobs for good people become more interesting. The easier it is to program, the easier it is to do the hard stuff, and somebody's going to pay good money for the hard stuff that newly became feasible.
I have no idea what the total demand for good developers is, just that it's greater than the supply of good developers.
Also, pay attention to how fast the candidate works. If the candidate just whips it out, then (a) the candidate thinks well in code, or (b) the candidate has done Fizzbuzz about 29 times in the past three months. If the candidate has real problems, then (a) the candidate is having problems with the programming environment or (b) isn't worth hiring.
And what's wrong with "i" as a loop counter in a short loop? It's easy to type and traditionally used. Meaningful variable names are for variables that have a meaning outside the context of the program.
The Sun was also dimmer back then. It's slowly getting brighter. The temperatures would be higher now at 4000ppm than they were then.
It is, partly. Standards of beauty have varied over historical times. There are things that haven't changed (preferring smooth skin and symmetrical features) and things that have (preferred breast size).
Um, huh? Where did this come from?
You're going to have to define "science fiction" then. Most science fiction includes things that violate our understanding of the Universe. There are the traditional SF science violations that people tend to overlook (FTL, easy space travel, psionic abilities, etc.), but there's no bright-line difference between that and a magic-using society.
FWIW, Alice Norton published under the name Andre Norton. I don't know if she would have done as well under her own name, but she knew the scene back then and thought it wise to have a male pen name. Of course, we're talking about something from my youth, when the Hugo Awards were normally handed out by hadrosaurs.
If you're complaining now about revisionist history in Hollywood, you haven't been paying attention. There's very little real history there.
I suspect you'll find that the actors are also too tall to be period, and probably relatively few women then were as attractive as a B-list actress is now (and check for shaven armpits - that's relatively recent). I don't really care about race. Is there someone besides Samuel Jackson, Jr. who would have done as good a Nick Fury in the Marvel films?
We watched it when my son was in his pre-teens. When we got home, he discussed all the tactical problems with the battle scene, like they offended him so much he had to get them off his chest. (The big one I remember was about the ground troops to secure the site to drop the bomb.)
Does the name Miles Vorkosigan mean anything to you? That won a series Hugo last year for Lois McMaster Bujold, and her Five Gods series is up for consideration this year. Speaking of Hugos, N.K. Jemisin won two novel awards back-to-back for the first two books of her Broken Earth trilogy, and I'm not betting against "Stone Sky" winning the trilogy's third Hugo. Highly recommended. (Hugo winners are of uneven quality. Those two were very well-deserved.)
Really, did you think this question through? I believe Bujold now has more writing Hugos than anyone else, edging out Heinlein.
And here you have run into one of the most gender-neutral occupations around. A writer can sit at a desk or table and write. A writer can use a pen name of either sex. (Remember Andre Norton?) An erotica writer that appeals to women probably has an edge if female rather than male, due to more personal experience, but this is one of those rare jobs where having a vagina is a relevant qualification.
Stuck in what way? If everybody making significant decisions has rigid gender and race roles, there isn't going to be that much discussion, but that doesn't mean the decision-makers aren't stuck on race and gender? Back a couple of centuries ago, in this country, women weren't allowed to vote. Nice and simple. Then suffragists started making a fuss, and people were concerned about whether women should be allowed to vote. The right to vote wasn't stuck in a gender role, but there was more talk about it.
Has it occurred to you that a "good old boy's network" might control a lot of resources, which will be used to favor men and not women? We know that there was sexism earlier, and wound up with men controlling most of the large assets. This isn't a matter of choice, but rather inequality of opportunity.
This is Slashdot. A request for citations is reasonable, and not complying is reasonable. However, when someone on my side does it, it's "really easy for you to make a horrible accusation". Lighten up.
Which, even if true, tells us nothing about what effect feminism has on happiness. The world didn't stand still except for an increase in feminism. Economic inequality has been increasing over that period, for example.
Paranoia is not a desirable character trait, and neither is jumping to immutable conclusions with limited evidence.
Which is a product of other cultural expectations. Women are rated on their appearance more than men are. Women's clothing is more expensive and often less durable, and women are actually expected to have color coordination skills. They're often expected to put on make-up. A given degree of first-impression credibility takes a woman more money and time and thought than it takes a man.
Here's an answer: because it was really funny. Ghostbusters is not a cinematic classic. It's a very good silly comedy. Men in Hollywood recycle lots of things, so why not women?
You're overthinking this. We don't watch Ghostbusters for the spiritual enlightenment or the consideration of the human condition. We watch it because it's funny. I laughed all through the all-women remake. That's all the justification it needs.
Relax and don't assume that everything's a feminist plot, and you'll be happier.
Which doesn't mean that every gender inequality is caused by free choice.
This notion that the status quo has to be correct is if anything a bigger error.
We have looked at a lot of cases of unequal outcomes, and frequently found unequal opportunity, and reasons for the unequal outcomes. In many cases, we've recognized the reasons as invalid, fixed them, and gotten more equal outcomes.
Men and women are somewhat different, so, given no pressure on the matter, I'd expect to see some fields male-dominated and some female-dominated. I suspect nursing might be preponderantly female even if the problems with becoming a male nurse (and there are specific ones) went away. However, the differences between individuals are usually a lot bigger than those between sexes. (There are exceptions, of course, and I expect topless bar service to be female-dominated.)
This easily leads to the fallacy that, since we've advanced so much, remaining inequalities in outcome are due to actual biologically based differences. It's really easy to look at an inequality, find reasons to explain most or all of it, and stop there, not asking for the reasons behind the reasons. After all, each of us considers himself or herself a good person, and typically perceives other people as good, and finding that stuff we counted on isn't actually the case is uncomfortable.
I don't know about that. I've seen women who were quite successful at being self-promoting bullshit artists.