... put more women in charge ... to foster collaborative conversations

[The Chairman]

Inclusivity. We like it.

I really don't care what gender, natural or assumed, that a person is. Everyone is welcome here.

That goes for race, for sexual orientation, for religion, and even for political persuasion. Everyone is welcome and we try not to use any of those criteria for evaluating mods. We look for two main things

Are they helpful?
How do they react when challenged?​

But mods aren't the ones "in charge" around here. Neither are the sysadmins. Neither am I.

The users dictate a lot of what we do and how we do it. If you don't like something enough, you'll hit the "report bad post" button, and let us know all about it. If you think a particular person should be a mod, you'll often drop one of the staff a note telling us who and why. If you want a feature, a subforum or anything, you have gotten pretty good at communicating that to us. We listen and ergo, we grow.

So please, no matter what gender or sexual orientation: if you think someone is an effective leader, give us their name so we can check them out.

 

[AfterDark]

All my life I was never aware that someone's genitalia made them more or less capable in intellectual pursuits. Prehaps in the cases of cranial / rectal inversion it may have some bearing on the matter. WTH?!?!?!

 

[rddvet]

This is a place to come to talk about diving and diving related topics. I don't come here to be educated about sex/gender/politics/whatever isn't diving related. To the OP, there is zero need to start this topic here. Maybe if you were asking "why have women historically been under-represented in technical diving" or something in that vein it would be worthwhile. Otherwise I see no point in your post other than you feeling you need to educate people.

 

[Wibble]

What I’d like to know is…

A few years back this century I taught technical IT courses. For the introductory level ones such as web development the class had a fairly wide audience spread, with one third-ish females (sometimes more, sometimes less, but around a third overall). As the classes got more technical and in depth there were far fewer females, frequently none at all but never as many as a third.

Same in my technical IT career; the more technical the fewer females there are. Certain IT "trades" are almost dominated by females such as business analysis and project management. There are some females in technical roles, but a real minority compared with their male counterparts. IT technical conventions were another example where the vast majority of attendees were male.

It’s a bit similar with technical diving. A few females but predominantly males. Very different to recreational diving where there’s a more even split.

I’ve always wondered why that might be?

 

[Marie13]

@Wibble

I recently got introduced to a gal diver from Poland who is just starting the tech route. She told me that when she met me she was shocked I was a native born American. All the very occasional female tech divers she’s seen at the local quarry have been Polish or Russian. She said it’s very common for women to go towards tech in Northern European countries. For those who don’t know, the Chicago area has an extremely large Polish population.

The Great Lakes area has very few women tech divers. My tech/cave instructor is one of the few (also well known for CCR instruction). The ones I know often say they’re the only woman on the boat. There are many more in FL cave country and MX from what I can tell from FB posts and such.

 

[Marie13]

Oh, and for the record, just about every female boss I’ve ever had was miserable to work for.

 

[drrich2]

Isn't sex and gender the same thing?

What I see in common contemporary usage is sex used to denote biological category (e.g.: XY - male, XX - female), and gender the internal sense of identity one has (conceptually imagine what it might be like to have a 'female soul' in a male body, and you may see the distinction).

There is cultural turmoil. Decades ago, I believe some feminist-driven ideology wished to convince our culture that aside from shorter average height, lower average upper body strength, and the biological ability to bear and nurse children, that women and men differed mainly on the basis of cultural indoctrination into gender roles - culturally conceived and enforced standards of how men and women 'should' think and operate in society. In other words, one should not assume women to be functionally different in any way psychologically. Let boys play with dolls and cry, and girls play with trucks and toy guns; we'll grow up just alike! So 'gender' was to hardly matter.

Now we live in an age with a greater focus on identity politics. Pressure to address obvious biological males with female pronouns on the basis of their claimed internal experience of themselves, for example. Some of these undergo fairly extensive surgical and hormonal interventions to shape their bodies into the closest achievable imitation of the opposite biological sex. It seems to some, 'gender' matters a great deal.

 

[KDAD]

What is nice about internet forums is the anonymity that goes along with it so your race, religion, politics, gender, etc. shouldn't matter.

Did we solve the split fin and bp/w problems while I was asleep so that we can now solve societies other issues?

 

[Wibble]

One of the great things I love about techies / nerds / geeks is they really don't care about diversity malarkey. They really value competence, almost to a hatred of classic PHBs (Pointy Haired Bosses) and their sycophants.

 

[Marie13]

One of the great things I love about techies / nerds / geeks is they really don't care about diversity malarkey. They really value competence, almost to a hatred of classic PHBs (Pointy Haired Bosses) and their sycophants.

For coworkers, I don’t give a flying fig about the diversity stuff, as long as you’re competent at your job and can act civilized in the office. If you can’t do those two things, forget it.