I just read an article on women in the high-tech industry, engineering in particular. Over the last twenty years or so, the number of women technical managers and workers has slowly increased, and the percentage has gone from about 4 percent to about 12 percent, so there is still a long way to go before women reach parity in the high-tech work environment. Also, their pay tends to be less, but that is more a function of work experience: women engineers are generally younger than their male counterparts, at least today.

A lot of the comparisons can be explained by the fact that there are less women getting engineering degrees. About 20 percent of college engineering degrees go to women. Another problem is the high churn for women engineers. Compared to male engineers, women engineers are much more likely to leave the engineering fields for other fields.

So what can we do about it? And this argument applies to any other minority group in the workplace. The correct thing is to not let ethnicity nor gender nor age affect your decisions. That's a lot easier said than done. You can mandate it, legally, and managers can take that into account when deciding on promotions and raises. But that's a small group of people. Harder it is to make every employee follow that standard. You can't tell people how to treat other people, well you can but it's really hard to make people do something that they do subconsciously.

And one of the problems for minorities is a hostile work environment. If you don't feel like you belong, then you won't be happy at that job, so you find another line of work. That, I think, is the biggest problem. Having and enforcing guidelines on how managers treat employees goes a long way to help in that area. Making people treat each other with civility is harder if they weren't brought up that way.

And that's where the real focus has to be. You have to teach people to not judge people based on these factors, as they are naturally inclined to do. And you have to teach them early, so they grow up used to treating people for what they are inside. Rather ideal I suppose, but it is important. I've said before that you don't make societal changes by working on the current generation in power, you work on the next generation while they are young and are willing to learn.

So how is it in my workplace? Admittedly, I'm male and asian, so that pretty much makes me one of the majority. In the technical fields, and at least in my company, the typical worker is male and one of caucasian, asian, or indian. There are few women, few blacks, few hispanics at my work. But the question is, do I feel that we treat women differently? Do we treat blacks differently?

And the answer to that is that I don't believe we do. And here's the point: we have way too much work and way too many deadlines to be worried about the competencies of the person in the next cubicle. To succeed as a company you have to trust that everyone else is on the same track, and we're all on the same team.

Which I suppose brings me to a point I didn't discuss. Why people discriminate against others. Besides the fact that it's part of stereotyping and a useful species trait, what are other reasons? Afraid of someone else taking your job? Feel superior to the fairer sex -- if they can do your job then you're not your job well, obviously. There's also the sexual harrassment standpoint. Job discrimination is just a sign of a deeper sort of societal attitude. I have a hard time believing that some people shouldn't be in my workplace, partly because I have hard time believeing that I should be in my workplace.