Yes, that is what happened.

> sounds to me that, all other things being equal, the program was not able to change the culture

This reminds me of "we did not try hard enough, we need more intervention". I am not a proponent of it. The culture was not changed probably because there is more than just culture underlying human choice... at least that is my belief. Of course, not all is biology, but not all is culture. It seems that in this case things tend to indicate that there is more than culture behind these choices.

> it is possible that this program was the wrong approach

why not just convince people why they should choose X or Y? Why you have to reserve money or resources actively? That, you know, means that some people that are more valuable than others, will lose their chance... is not that discrimination? Is it not that what they are fighting? You do not fight discrimination by promoting it from another side...

> i may love programming, but i hate working in a bro-culture

Oh, and in teaching it does not happen the opposite? I might not like in a sis culture, right? I mean, the problem exists... no, the problem does not. Things are the way they are and we can encourage people to change them if they want, not by shifting the cost to others. If you work somewhere, you cannot pretend the world will change immediately around you just bc we think it should be something different. We need to deal with that, and trying to force everything into our ideal just leads to frustration. Instead we should analyze real causes for things and why they happen or will keep happening instead of fighting them by transferring costs to people that have nothing to do with the problem.

then why try at all? if we believe this goal should be achived then we should keep trying until we get there.

You do not fight discrimination by promoting it from another side

that is a reasonable argument, but plenty of counter arguments exist. some are being discussed on this page.

Oh, and in teaching it does not happen the opposite?

oh sure, however, teaching is an entirely different problem.

as a parent i want my children to be exposed to male and female role models (what teachers are to them) in equal measure. therefore for the sake of children i want gender parity in schools to be enforced by law.

but you could make the same argument with other professions that are dominated by one gender. nurses are probably a good example where men may not feel comfortable.

we can encourage people to change them if they want, not by shifting the cost to others

why not?

one question is, what goal do we want to achieve. the other question is, how do we achieve it?

what we want is gender equality, that is equality of opportunity (not necessarily equality of outcome)

so that means we want more opportunities for women in engineering. for that we need to understand what is keeping women out of engineering, and how can we get more women into engineering. (and then replay that for any profession and respective gender)

and if access to financial resources is a reason, then it absolutely makes sense to provide additional financial resources to women.

again, i have no idea what happened in norway. access to university is free in norway, so i don't know what they would need money for.

if discrimination by men is what keeps women out of engineering, then what we need to do is to get men to change. how do we get them to change? possibly only by exposing men to more female coworkers. but that means forcing the issue, and pushing women into engineering until men learn to treat women as equals.

i don't care about gender balance in engineering or any other profession (except teaching), but i strongly care about women and men being treated equally, and a large part of that is men learning to treat women as their equal and respect them professionally.

we should analyze real causes for things and why they happen or will keep happening instead of fighting them by transferring costs to people that have nothing to do with the problem

you are saying that as if it were a contradiction. yes of course we need to analyze the real causes.

but we also need to find an approach to solve the problem.

It is good to try, but we already tried a million times. It just does not work. This is like trying to jump from the top of a building and trying to not get hurt when you smash the ground. Reality has a certain shape. Some people try to fight reality based on the fact of "things should be like in my mind" ignoring all psychology, antropology, biology and other aspects behind it saying it is just a cultural thing.

As I said before, it this was just cultural, numbers would not have come back to the starting point. This is a very clear signal that we should not be doing that, but something else. Or probably nothing! Because doing that creates side effects. I am ok with promoting women to study engineering, as my parents did with "what do you like better?", "wanna try this?", for which I and them payed the cost in time and money. But I am totally against arranging public resources systematically so that people that are valuable cannot enter a place because of a stupid quota. That should be, literally, illegal, under the premise that discrimination is forbidden for reasons of gender, race, etc.

> one question is, what goal do we want to achieve. the other question is, how do we achieve it?

The goal is that people should be happy and doing what they want. You do not need a grant to give an engineering to someone bc she is a woman. That is not true. You just need to encourage them. Yet they do this, why?

If some people are not happy by how the world looks in their mind (I think we all find things we do not like), that is not a reason to start public scholarships and stuff like that to do things that clearly do not work, or at least, have not worked before. If I try a business, or something to promote something positive to others, I am not entitled to make 3rd parties pay the economic and discrimination (they get out of the system bc of quotas). The second thing is even worse than the economic part, which is not good either, anyway, IMHO, bc it violates the right of people to their property/effort.

> if discrimination by men is what keeps women out of engineering, then what we need to do is to get men to change.

Where did you take that men discriminate women in engineering? Please show me the facts. This is so silly. I have worked with women in engineering, for me they are just my mates. This is like saying I am discriminated when I am a man and date bc girls look more at certain aspects of me than what I pay attention from them.

It is just different interests, you cannot do anything against that. And there is nothing bad in it. If it bothers someone, it is that person who has a problem accepting reality. They pretend the one who has the problem is reality. This is highly absurd...

> i don't care about gender balance in engineering or any other profession (except teaching)

Me none. I do not care almost 70% are women in Spain university, as long as there is no incentive to promote girls and leave guys out. If things are like that, there must be a reason, and the reason is not discrimination, at least in Spain. That is silly. The only discrimination I saw is the fact that they are actively bribing girls to study certain degrees, but when a degree is full of women, they do not do the opposite. That said, I am against this kind of briving in either direction. If you want to study something, it is bc you have a natural motivation in the first place: shifting the cost to third parties should be illegal, as I said.

> you are saying that as if it were a contradiction. yes of course we need to analyze the real causes.

The problem is that they do not, at least it looks like no when they run public programmes. What they do is to try to maximize the votes like when a scammer tries to sell you a broken product or service. Their interest is to maximize the benefit for them, not for us. This, unfortunately, is the nature of politics (and of humans, in general): we do what benefits us the most first, and later, yes, we are not super bad and we have a heart there. But we go first. It is like that. There is plenty of literature showing all this...

> but we also need to find an approach to solve the problem.

There is not a problem. It is not a problem that most girls are teachers or most guys are engineers. Look how easy it is: you talk to men and you tell them why they should be teaching. You talk to women and you tell them why they should do engineering (higher wages, blabla). If they do not want to choose it, there is nothing you can do, you have to respect it and not starting an artificial war that just has bad side effects: kicking out people that genuinely wanted to study something bc of a quota, creating an artificial incentive and have people with zero vocation on a job... things like that.

You just make things worse when you do this. Honest opinion: the problem does not exist. Bc "we want more men, women, black, white, whatever" in place X is just a wish of the mind that should not be a real goal just bc of our taste for symmetry. It would be nice? Probably for some. But you are making others pay the cost. Noone is entitled to shift the cost of things they do not pay for to 3rd parties. I will always be against that, and it should be illegal (in theory it is..., at least in Spain, but in practice they do it).