I just remembered a story from an article on Vox's site and i thought some of you might be interested.

Apparently, a key reason that young women aren't choosing careers in STEM is dating. Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd College, found concern that their 'geeky' male classmates will present poor social prospects is genuinely one of three key barriers to young women entering STEM (along with concerns that it would be boring, and that they wouldn't be any good at it).

Okay, so the three main reasons women aren't going into STEM fields is because they don't want to be around geeky men, it's boring, and/or they're not any good at it. So what role did the patriarchy play in their decision?

Klawe reported her intriguing finding at the Future Tense Women in STEM event in Washington DC last week. She is a role model for college leaders who seek to attract young women to study STEM subjects -- by which I mean science, technology, engineering and mathematics, subjects where men still outnumber women by three to one. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-layla-mccay/women-in-stem-its-time-to_b_5076711.html?utm_hp_ref=technology&ir=Technology

Ah, there it is, every prestigious field needs to have at least 50% women, because reasons.

Harvey Mudd College has impressively redesigned their teaching methods to even out the gender ratio in their STEM programs.

I'm all for that, as long as they don't dumb anything down, and/or try to handicap men for being good at what they do... lets see where they went with this.

But the main message of the day was that attracting women into STEM is just the first step.

And how did they attract women?

With a three-step method, Harvey Mudd College in California quadrupled its female computer science majors. The experiment started in 2006 when Maria Klawe, a computer scientist and mathematician herself, was appointed college president. That year only 10% of Harvey Mudd’s CS majors were women. The department’s professors devised a plan.

They no longer wanted to weed out the weakest students during the first week of the semester.

Did they just imply that most of the women there are too weak to compete on an even footing with their male counterparts?

The new goal was to lure in female students and make sure they actually enjoyed their computer science initiation in the hopes of converting them to majors.

I guess so.

They renamed the course previously called “Introduction to programming in Java” to “Creative approaches to problem solving in science and engineering using Python.” Using words like “creative” and “problem solving” just sounded more approachable. Plus, as Klawe describes it, the coding language Python is more forgiving and practical.

I don't know much about this shit but the wording seems to imply that they lowered the standards in order to get more women interested in programming. Does anyone know anything about python?

As part of this first step, the professors divided the class into groups—Gold for those with no coding experience and Black, for those with some coding experience. Then they implemented Operation Eliminate the Macho Effect: guys who showed-off in class were taken aside in class and told, “You’re so passionate about the material and you’re so well prepared. I’d love to continue our conversations but let’s just do it one on one.”

Ahhh, so the guys that took pride in their knowledge were basically told to STFU in class because feelings, okay.

Literally overnight, Harvey Mudd’s introductory CS course went from being the most despised required course to the absolute favorite, says Klawe. http://qz.com/192071/how-one-college-went-from-10-female-computer-science-majors-to-40/

TL;DR the only way for women to succeed in male dominated fields is by lowering the standards and handicapping men just so women can feel more comfortable.

And they call us misogynists.