&gt;The implied argument here is that if engineers make social justice their number-one priority, then little engineering gets done.<p>Right. And the argument I&#x27;m making is that they are NOT mutually exclusive. A lot of people seem to be taking the road of logic implying that taking conscious actions in increasing women&#x27;s participation in tech will not get engineering done. I am contesting the logic behind that.<p>&gt;Regardless of whether or not gender studies departments are responsible for reducing female STEM majors, women prefer working with people rather than things<p>As someone else pointed out in the thread, the women participation in tech has actually gone down. Now, you can argue women have actually gotten MORE people friendlier, but then I&#x27;d go back to my original point: what was in tech that drove them away?<p>I&#x27;ll restate my general position once more: this is not a liberal wishy-washy &#x27;ooh lets make all equal&#x27; argument. Diversity in tech is diversity in thought process, diversity in approaches to solutions, more resistant to specific types of failures. Just like you wouldn&#x27;t want monoculture forests or crops, you don&#x27;t want mono-culture engineers. I&#x27;d go one step further: even IF hiring women costs you quite reasonably in terms of &#x27;efficiency&#x27; originally (measured by LOC&#x27;s I guess? How do y&#x27;all do that?), your returns will be much higher in terms of longer term gain.<p>EDIT: I&#x27;ll bite my words a bit. Above is necessary only if you want to (or want to pretend to) care about the long-term future of your company and environment for your employees. If your strategy is to pump and dump, forget women in tech (they just are not the coding type--right-- don&#x27;t even get the starTrekWarsRingsLords references?)