I'm going to apologize in advance because this is probably going to get a bit long and I generally like to try and keep things as brief as I reasonably can.
I don't want to get too off topic, but I think what you're talking about is (correct me if I'm wrong) that you see programs trying to entice women (for example) into STEM fields (for example) as a kind of push to create an artificial equality of men and women when women and men aren't necessarily interested in the same things in the same numbers. Consequently, because not all fields pay the same, there will be some inequality based on that. That about right?
Yes, that's exactly right.
I agree to a point. People should be free to pursue whatever they want. What I think should be addressed is the kind of situation where a certain field is less appealing to women (for instance) not because of the inherent nature of the field but how its members treat women.
I agree, and I think there's a discussion to be had there. There are definitely some people in certain fields that act unfairly toward people on this basis and I believe that's wrong and something that we should speak out against.
On the other hand, there are cases like the so-called "Donglegate" that took place at PyCon where I think things were taken way, way too far. It's one thing to be overtly unfair or unprofessional to someone, it's another to make a benign joke to someone in a conversation that was never intended to be public. I think the person who uploaded that to Twitter with the intention of shaming these people did a bad thing, though I don't think it was bad enough that she deserved to be publicly shamed herself and lose her job in the same way the other person did.
In general, I think any accusations of unfairness (or of most things) should be approached with the assumption that all parties were acting in good faith, because usually people are. That way people aren't, for example, publicly shamed to the point of losing their jobs because they made a joke about the word "dongle" in a conversation intended to be private. But unfortunately, it seems like in the age of the internet, everyone is so quick to assume bad faith whenever something marginally bad happens. People always seem ready to jump on their high horse and start acting like they're the holiest kid on the block whenever they see even the smallest perceived injustice.
I'm not really sure what specific point I'm trying to make, I'm really just ranting about several things (it's late), but I think you probably get what I'm saying. There's more to this than just being fair and while I think we
do need to address people acting like jerks on the basis of things like gender or race, I have concerns with the "climate" that may come about as a result of people trying to address this issue without considering it more deeply. Obviously, I care more about these issues since many of the fields under scrutiny are fields I am involved with.
So in the chicken-and-the-egg debate I see women not going into certain fields as often as men is because they are not welcomed or are in some way or another actively or artificially pushed away from it. They don't find it appealing because they can see all the extraneous stuff that they'd have to deal with and take that into consideration. I don't think it's usually intentional that people in a field are creating a hostile environment, but I think it's still on them to change it regardless. That's the kind of way I'd like to see pay/workplace inequality addressed.
Changing attitudes is a very difficult thing to do without causing a huge mess. I think it's even more difficult in a case like this where there are a
lot contributing factors making it more complex; it's much easier when it's simple to determine who is right and who is wrong. It's hard to argue that segregation is a good thing, for instance.
Part of the problem is that, for brevity's sake, we have to generalize a lot when talking about this issue. Unfortunately, these generalizations themselves are part of the problem, making people on both sides constantly feel straw-manned or stereotyped. This tends to drive people even more into the team mentality, which tends to give a bigger voice to the extremists on both sides and, as a result, drive more people to the extreme positions. And the fact that there are so many different people (a fair few with their own agendas) arguing so many different things contributes to a general sense of confusion; people on either side or on the outside don't see a nice, concise list of points and counter-points, they see a giant mess of cruel one-liners, over-the-top rhetoric, propaganda, and the occasional tl;dr post like this that tries to wade through some of the complexity and probably ends up failing to do so adequately.
The end result of this giant, mangled mess is that people on either side are going to rally behind incidents like the one I mentioned that showcase the worst bits of the other side. Journalists report on the more extreme incidents and viewpoints because they're more interesting and profitable; the kind of discussions we're having here aren't very interesting to your average reader. Eventually, people who stand to profit even more off the situation (journalists, politicians, lawyers, business owners) are going to smell blood and come running to support one side or another, cheered on by people too blind to see past the us-versus-them mentality, who are just happy to have another person in their corner and who all too eager to see those a-holes on the other side suffer the same way they made us suffer. In the end, we
will get action, and probably plenty of it, it just won't be very
good action. The change that we get might have a few good things that one side or the other likes, but it's also going to have a fair lot of stuff the extremists on either side wanted as well, as well as a lot of stuff that benefits those politicians/businesses/etc that decided to get themselves involved for their own benefit. As a whole, we'll all be largely worse off than we were before when there was the occasional incident where someone acted like a jerk now and then and usually got called on it.
For ideas on the kinds of things we might see, rather than a professional or even informal code of ethics that incorporates professionalism and fair behavior (as close to an ideal solution as I can come up with) while simultaneously protecting certain kinds of behavior, we might end up having some businesses that deliberately pay women more, other businesses that respond to this by capitalizing on the negative sentiment that this creates, maybe a new law that forbids salary renegotiation in the name of helping women, another law passed in the name of fighting "those darned liberals" that guarantees a company's right to deny employment to someone on the basis of sex, and tons of published articles from everyone and their mother evangelizing these actions from either side to their followers and demonizing the "other side" for doing the same sort of thing. Meanwhile, plenty of people are profiting off the whole situation at all of our expense. All the while, all that was probably needed to begin with was a bit of honest discussion, a more-or-less formal code of ethical behavior agreed to by moderates from both sides, and an assumption by people "on the streets" that, without evidence to the contrary, others are acting in good faith.
Re: workplace deaths, I think a feminist would say that more safety precaution and/or regulatory oversight would be helpful.
Sure. Most rational people would say that. The point I was making was that looking at aggregate statistics and then deciding a course of action meant to "correct inequality" without investigating further is a bad idea. It was probably a bit inflammatory, but for all my whining about one-liners and over-simplifying things, I seem to be guilty of it, too.
I've heard (anecdotally) that in police forces it's men not women who instigate/exacerbate the overwhelming number of violent encounters while woman officers are much better at de-escalating potentially dangerous situations so I think a feminist would encourage the adoption and training of all officers in the methods/manners used by those successful women officers as a way of reducing violent encounters and consequently deaths of officers.
I don't know whether that's the case, but I was thinking more about jobs in industry and such. I guess public service probably has more deaths, though; I'm sure being a police officer is probably one of the more dangerous lines of work. I do think many officers could stand to be trained better in deescalating situations. I don't know if that has anything to do with gender or not, though.
