re: Report on women in computer science
Topics: Sexism
10 Feb 1992
From:
There are a couple of things in this abstract they bear on points we
have discussed with regard to AA and I can't help :-) commenting on them.
> [ ethical problems with few women in computer science ]
Huh? What about the ethical concerns of the lack of men engaged in
child rearing or the lack of Whites involved in rap music or whatever?
> [ there will not be enough engineers unless underrepresented groups
> participate ]
We've heard this claim before with regard to minorities. I just don't
buy it. How many scientists and engineers do we need? 20 million
would be a huge number. There 125 million men in the U.S. What's the
problem? The question is: if a very important profession, P, needs another
worker, W, and therefore has to pay a little more, is it cheaper to hire
another White male (or whatever) or another Black female (or whatever)?
The answer, at least as things are currently structured, is usually the
former. This might not be fair in some global sense, but the 'we need
these workers' argument doesn't hold water. As the White male labor pool
is about to be used up it will become cost effective to tap other sources.
There is no a priori 'enough' for any profession. We use what we can afford.
If we had half as many of W in P as we have now, life would go on. How many
countries have 0 W in P? If it is too expensive to educate the 20% minority
population, we'll do without another 20% W in P. We did without when the
population was 20% less than it is now.
Let me turn the question around and ask it terms of who has the wealth.
If one has a zero sum redistribution program, i.e. the total wealth is
unchanged and the distribution with respect to income is unchanged
(the top 10% still make 50% of the total income), when is such a program
legitimate?
I suppose the answer from Chau-Wen is that the redistribution he has in
mind is not zero-sum. If that is so, then is there any justification for
the 'not enough minorities in P' argument (other than an economic analysis
of a particular situation)? I mean that if the justification is truly
economic and not social (as I think it is in most minds that propose such
arguments) then the simple argument of disproporionate numbers proves nothing.
> [ a study finds that sex biases in language discourage women
> from pursuing technical fields ]
And this is an MIT tech report?
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