that&#x27;s not an argument against what i&#x27;m saying, of course you could always dream up someone less privileged than any example i give.<p>am i saying racism isn&#x27;t a thing? no. am i saying that we shouldn&#x27;t tackle issues of discrimination and features of society that encourage people to fill certain gender roles? no.<p>all i&#x27;m saying is that demonising white males is wrong, and i don&#x27;t believe in some sort of naive quota system or any other heavy handed intervention for many reasons.<p>if we want to encourage women into programming that&#x27;s great start at the supply side, artificially increasing demand with quotas etc or moving further away from a merit based system in any way helps no one.<p>i have spoken to and know many talented bright females, and there is a general dis interest in STEM usually, especially programming. and if you bother to ask they don&#x27;t talk about discouragement from entering a male dominated field, or bias or discrimination or lack of opportunity they talk about a general disinterest. could we market to them better? maybe, but there are clearly steps we should take and others we should not.<p>as for all the other problems with society which for some reason the tech world feels it has to rectify we&#x27;re going about it entirely the wrong way. we should not discriminate on race positively or negatively if we want to help disadvantaged people let&#x27;s do that by targeting the disadvantaged without taking race into account. racial profiling unneeded and we don&#x27;t need to stigmatise anyone.