I agree with the sentiment in your first sentence, but really, loving Facebook and CandyCrush is the first trait you think of to eliminate? If only that were the worst thing about us.
I've never seen a woman do this so I suspect this is just your stereotype-based expectations biasing your interpretations. Peoples' memory of events are notoriously unreliable and extremely susceptible to the power of suggestion, like the suggestion that women are more prone to emotional outbursts, which is an age-old trope. http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2012/mar...
Ok, but "be a billionaire and start a VC firm" and "kick ass" aren't actionable pieces of advice for anyone except the half-dozen or so women he mentioned.
I appreciate the characterization of VC firms as clubs though. That makes sense.
If the person is adding value while not on maternity (or paternity) leave then it would be worthwhile to pay them while they are gone so they come back and continue working for you. If you don't do it, some other employer probably will, and they may choose to work for the employer with better benefits instead.
Whatever algorithm was used to decide what point to link the tooltip to on the top scatter plot is mildly infuriating. It's impossible to get the tooltip to highlight the pink dots at the low end of the scale. I can't mouse over them, my mouse is forced to jump around it.
EDIT: Finally got the pink dots on the left to highlight, but after much maneuvering. This is a minor bug but you might want to fix it so people don't get frustrated and leave.
It is part of the conversation. There was just an NPR Forum segment about it yesterday or so. There are articles about it sometimes (e.g., http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25859513/nations-large...). This solution often ends up not being pursued because it's extremely expensive and energy intensive not only to desalinate but to then pump the water to where it needs to go, and you also have waste product to deal with. So in many cases it has been decided that other avenues, like conservation, are more economical.
I don't agree this is an anti-feminist choice, but I think people might see it that way because genuinely anti-feminist people like to claim that a woman's place is in the home and that women's brains aren't really suited for tasks that aren't nurturing. So women staying home to take care of the children, on a surface level, supports this traditional anti-feminist argument and this is why it could be seen as anti-feminist.
My intuition (and cultural tropes) tells me this varies depending on whether you are male or female. You can look at the age differentials of married couples and see that women will marry men who are older than them (or men will marry women who are younger) meaning that as women age they should likely have a harder time finding a partner.
Also I agree with other commenters who point out that in CS, several schools outside the Ivy league are considered good names: MIT, Stanford, CMU, UC Berkeley, Caltech, UIUC, in that order. With the Ivy leagues I'd rank it somewhat like this:
Name matters far more than quality of education, which is hard (or currently impossible) to measure, and usually gleaned through your interviews. In fact, name is a proxy for the quality of education. This is true not just at companies, but in graduate programs. I've seen people in evaluating positions openly discriminate on the basis of school.
Also, you give Harvard and Yale as examples of the "good name" schools and UC Berkeley and CMU as examples of "quality education" schools, but it's not that simple. In my experience, schools with smaller programs tend to offer far better educational experiences than schools with very large programs. In this sense, Harvard is more likely to give you a better undergraduate education that UC Berkeley, where huge class sizes make for a very different classroom experience, and you will find it more difficult to get to know your professors than at a smaller school. If I were choosing, I would look for a school that had a good name, modest CS class sizes, high quality peers, and where undergraduates had many opportunities to work closely with faculty. The class size and faculty interaction is where schools like UC Berkeley lose out.
The trick to not getting into an argument with this gossiper is to always seem like you have the utmost sympathy their point of view, but you can also defend the other person by playing as if you are extremely sympathetic to them too. You will come off as just a really nice person, and most people will like you for it.
Why not try to carefully stick up for this non-present colleague? As long as you don't make the person who is gossiping feel attacked or belittled, this could effectively discourage the behavior. The trick is to convince the group that you are above petty complaining about others. People who are positive, smiling, and upbeat tend to be more likable than those who are negative and complain, like this gossiper seems to be. Maybe just gently smile and point out the good sides of this non-present person. If the gossiper says something negative about this person, try to downplay it by saying something like "Oh, I've had that happen to me too".
If you really want to leave the lunch, you could have "an important lunch meeting" conflict with this one (ask some other coworker to have lunch with you to ostensibly talk about work), or claim that you have an important deadline to meet and must work through lunch for several weeks. After a while, they will forget to ask you.