fireburn95 said:
Subjects are graduated onto young pupils, you cannot force them into a direction. The whole point of primary and secondary school (dunno US equivelant grades) is to let pupils experience all subjects, and see what they click with. Every girl uses a computer, and does ICT stuff on there, and so does every boy. If more boys choose ICT-based careers than girls consistently, one could argue there is a biological favouring to such fields to gender. More women are in nursing and health care, probably due to many women having natural caring instincts because of the ability to carry a baby. That's why saying 'promoting IT to girls' is a squib because you also have every other industry who wants to promote their industry to all students.
And how is a work environment not favoured to women? Are you actually saying companies should put special things in there for women. Many women would actually be offended by that. Women aren't incapable of working in an environment new to them.
And treatment and respect should be for all people in every jobs, not just women.
We don't. We all have our beliefs and ideologies. There are ideologies that I disagree with, and agree with. So disagreeing with modern feminism is not a reason to lose a job, and is actually highly illegal to fire someone because of their ideology, or lack thereof.
"Everyone benefits..." Really? Is that true, is that scientific proven? I benefit when the people around me are competent and skilled, not whether half of them have penises and half of them have vaginas.
And finally, you think it's fair that someone skilled at a job may lose out to that job because a company hires someone to up their metrics. That is certainly illegal in the UK, and I assume USA too, and is unfair to those who work their asses of to get a career they love and lose it out because they were born in the wrong skin color or with the wrong sex chromosomes.
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I basically agree with everything you said exept for this part. We have not studied gender issues and relations long enough to differentiate with certainty between nature vs. nurture on these Topics.
I would argue that the reason a large amout of female students when presented with computer sience still wouldn't be as interested as boys, is because of their home invironment. Because 'it's something that girls don't like to do' is a reinforced stereotype in many parents heads to this date. The struggle for equality has not been going on long enough to erase centuries of cultural identity and gender stereotypes. I'm not even talking about something that is done with bad intent or even conciously. It's as simple as calling your little girl to help you build a computer, while relating how things work, thus fostering an early interest, vs. refrainig from doing so because you would just bore her. A home invironment that does not trust a girl with technical knowlegde will probably result in a woman with a lack of interest in technology just as much as a boy that did not get to do any domestic work would probably grow into a man less than inclined to go into a nursing profession.
While bringing the subjects to students as early as kindergarden or primary school is a good step, they usually cannot reverse behaviour patterns learned at home, earlier in life.
And on the subject of the gender inequality in nursing professions an intersting tidbid is perhaps that, higher pay correlates directly with the percantage of men found in the professions. In my country secondary school teachers, which are among highest payed in the wider field of nursing and education are about 50/50 men to women. Primary school teachers get lower wages than that and there is a higher percentage of women among them. Kindergarden teachers get payed less than that and have an overwhelmingly female demographic. Similar result can be found in the health/nursing sector.
When asked what would make these professions more attractive to men, the overwhelming anwer was simply, better payment. It wasn't some natural inclanation that kept the men from working in these fields, in fact many would have liked to, but they felt like their work wasn't valued enough. This suggests that historically women are trained to be content with lesser payment. This is in the process of being rectified with higher payments across the board being fought for, but it's a long process.
On the topic of your friend, as others have said, if it really is how you say and he was suggested to leave based solely on that statement that would be wrong.
But there are so many factors at play (not in the least that this is a second hand story, from an offended party, that we don't know the other side of) that's it's hard to make a judgement call. As others have suggested he should probably inquire friendly why exactly he is being fired.
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