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Lawyers and Doctors seem to be faring better than Programmers.

"Because they wanted/didn't want to do it" isn't where the trail of inquiry ends, btw.




>"Because they wanted/didn't want to do it" isn't where the trail of inquiry ends, btw.

Absolutely this. I think a lot of educators today understand that they should encourage diverse students, but they still exhibit a variation on the old "X hours of homework isn't that bad" where they ignore that their class isn't your whole academic life.

Socrates may be a fantastic ally himself, but it's very likely some of his students' other teachers aren't, so it's completely reasonable for them to fall out of STEM "despite the support."


Lawyers? Male dominated field, especially higher paying/partner fields. [0]

Doctors? Depends on the field. Pediatrics, gynecology, and a few other fields are female-dominated while surgeons (especially neurosurgeons), orthopedics, and a few other fields are male-dominated. [1]

With roughly 20/80 F/M ratios those fields fair about as poorly as the programming field.

[0] http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/uncategorized/201...

[1] http://www.journalacs.org/article/S1072-7515(13)01215-5/abst...

E:

Better choice of adverb: well -> poorly


> Lawyers? Male dominated field, especially higher paying/partner fields. [0]

That's a relative term. The legal profession is about 50-50 in school and at the associate (1-10 years experience) level. While the partner ranks are still heavily male, about a third of new partners are women.[1] As are a third of federal appellate judges. 20% of Fortune 500 General Counsel/CLOs are women.

There is a lot of (justified) hand-wringing in the legal profession about how much work is left to do. But at every stage, the representation of women is much higher than in engineering.

[1] http://dfalliance.com/research/new-partner-report/


There is a difference between "DF Alliance firms" and "firms nationwide". I'm not sure there is data on new partners for more than that sub-sect of diversity-focused firms and 121 firms is nothing. I'm in charge of running more firm websites than that...a supermajority of them male or male dominated.

>...there were 47,563 law firms serving the U.S. in the year 2000 according to the American Bar Foundation.

(Google result for "how many law firms are in the US")

Associates is the major exception.


That's a fair point, but the study's sample includes the largest firms in the country, which employ a disproportionate share of private practice lawyers.




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