It all comes down to equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. When there is equality of opportunity women choose different fields...often (but not always) because of different interests. Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in.
And that is before you get into interests vs natural talent and how that does or does not affect ones success in a field. On a fundamental level I personally prefer equality of opportunity and freedom of choice.
As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument. Are there times when that is true? Absolutely. But, men do not have a monopoly on being jerks, creating toxic work environments or harassing people. Personally I've seen bad behavior from both sides. I've also seen exceptional talent, skill, empathy etc. come from both groups. Many corporate cultures are toxic to everybody, irregardless of your gender.
I'm sure this will be down voted, but it is what it is.
I think its a lot more complicated than this. Yes, men and women can be jerks. The bigger issues seem to be when a team is 80%+ one gender or another, and the issues aren't about "being mean" the issues are about the dominant group being blind to and then not accommodating the nondominant group's needs.
A huge problem is that we have a lot of 6 person tech teams with 5 guys and 1 women and the women naturally feel alienated and either aren't actually able to do well or are at least perceived as not doing well due to their situation. This holds back women's career development as a group and reduces the numbers of women in higher ranks in corporate life.
> the issues are about the dominant group being blind to and then not accommodating the nondominant group's needs.
I do not think that is the problem of 80%+ one gender groups.
Imagine going into a store and see that 80%+ is the opposite gender. Before anyone has a chance of accommodating your need, what emotions pops up? Now compared that to going into the same store with the 80%+ being your own gender.
Going into an environment where you feel like a part of a dominating group give most people a feeling of security. They feel safe and what ever choice everyone else does is a safe choice to adapt. Entering a group where you are a minority has not just the absence of that, but can also induce a sense of insecurity.
This is one theory why countries like Sweden have a very extreme gender segregation of around 90% of men and 90% of women working in a gender segregated profession. From student to senior employee, every step is impacted in how secure the person feel in continuing with their career path, and the above effect influence how leaky the pipe get.
> And lots of people are investing lots of time and effort into trying to fix that problem
Are they? I worked in the mental health space for over 10 years and almost 80% of therapists are women -- and a vast majority of those are white women. There hasn't been any significant movement to "fix" that despite a very compelling argument that finding a therapist who is a good match to a patient is fundamental to the success of treatment -- there's actually a scientific case to be made that more diversity in mental health care is beneficial to outcomes. However, there's little evidence that "more women" designing silicon chips has any measurable benefit (or harm.) Having more women (and old people, and people from different cultural backgrounds) involved in UX design is definitely valuable -- but more women writing back-end server code or designing airplane wings has little effect either good or bad.
Women vastly outnumber men in the social sciences and in education however, "We need more men kindergarten teachers" has never been a serious initiative. Getting more women into commercial fishing, oil field work, plumbing, or over-the-road trucking has never been seriously pursued. But "computer science" -- it's a damned obsession with people of certain politics.
It's a fact that men and women are different, both biologically and socially. Women can certainly be exceptional computer workers and men could be great therapists or kindergarten teachers -- but that doesn't mean they necessarily want those things nor are they necessarily pre-disposed with the characteristics necessary for success in those fields. It's a fact, for example, that there are gender differences in spatial reasoning. That doesn't mean all men are better than all women at spatial reasoning, but it does mean that men have a statistically higher success with spatial reasoning than do women as a group. Women have their own advantages over men as well. There is nothing wrong with differences and it has gotten stupid how people insist on claiming that everyone is equal. They're not. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.
This insistence that we have to "fix" the "problem" is just woke nonsense. We should absolutely, 100% end discrimination in the professions -- no question or debate there. But we should stop trying to force equality as an outcome. Let people gravitate towards the things they're good at or care about instead of trying to social engineer everything to please some imaginary ideal. If a girl wants to hack on compilers -- we should get out of her way (i.e. removing bias and discrimination) and let her do it. But we shouldn't be focused on going into third-grade classrooms and trying to convince girls that they should care about hacking on compilers. We should be focused on exposing every student to vast possibilities, but we don't need to force it down people's throats as a social imperative.
I think it comes from how software has become a financially lucrative profession in nice office environment with semi-flexible hours relatively recently. An overall attractive package with the corresponding political attention it gets as a result.
While all the other things you mentioned other than maybe oil field work are not as financially lucrative.
> I think it comes from how software has become a financially lucrative profession in nice office environment with semi-flexible hours relatively recently.
In short, the goal is to put people of a certain group in positions of power and influence.
People of a certain group are already in positions of power and influence. The goal is to ensure that people from all groups get a slice of the power and influence. Why would you (or anybody?) not want that?
No one expressed any opinion or judgement, so please don't impose your prejudice on others. The point is that the first step to fix a problem is to correctly identify it. If you misrepresent the problem them obviously you cannot succeed at fixing it.
This is generally a great summary. We have near full employment right now, so that means in order to pull more women into engineering, you'd have to fill those industries the women are coming from with equally talented men.
In other words, you'd effectively be taking would-be male engineers and converting them into nurses and teachers. And vice versa. The number of people that consider those fields a toss up is vanishingly small. They require completely different skill sets.
It's a matter of power. There extremely few women CEOs, or millionaires, in positions of power. Legally they have all the same rights, sure, but all these power structures are men's clubs. IT is one of those, it's a matter of power, but much less ambitious.
It’s a sad reflection of the current world that you were downvoted. It is a matter of power. If it wasn’t professions typicalLy associated with care taking , I.e. women, would not be lower paid than professions associated with men. People in power, mainly men, decide which should be more valued and guess what they tend to value more? Historically software engineering started more a women dominated field (men were in the more valued hardware field then) and as software became more important it became increasingly defined as a men’s field and theories then prop up that it’s the natural way, men are simply more inclined than women. Bollocks!
The power structures are sociopaths' club. If anything, I'd rather say that it's powerful people prefer to be men, than being a man gives one any power. Most of the men are clueless powerless people.
I have managed delivery teams and this all fits my experience. One sex can have 100% best intentions but can nonetheless dominate. My best performing, and funnest, teams have been nearly equally split.
Keep in mind that if I am in a team of 5, then 80% of the group is in the dominant "not-me group" and 20% is in the minority "me group". We often (and reasonably) choose to prioritise the needs of the dominant group over the non-dominant group. If I want to use Elm, but the rest of the team wants to use JS and React, I'd actually be a bit of a jerk to force them all to accommodate my wishes.
While contrived, I'm convinced this is precisely the problem. If I am a woman on a team of men, am I a bit of a jerk for demanding that the rest of the team accommodates me? Perhaps they all have a communication style that suits them that is born from their upbringing as male children while I have a communication style that equally suits me, but is different from theirs. Must I adapt to their system, or should they adapt to mine?
When we talk about programming style, or preferences for tools the answer is seemingly easy. We go with the majority so that we please the most people. When we talk about gender, sexual orientation, race, etc the answer is much more complex. We can divide our groups in infinite ways and yet some categorisations are chosen to be significant while others are not.
Because of this, I feel that it is actually really important that we recognise that we will not and can not accommodate everyone. Being different, having a different opinion, having a different set of experiences is not actually enough to warrant special treatment. In many cases we choose to discriminate: no matter how good a Java programmer you are, we will not write our frontend in GWT! (Real story: I maintain a frontend written in Java and GWT, so I'm taking some liberties ;-) ).
As I said, there are some special cases where we have decided that we wish to provide special accommodation. We do this because, on balance, we believe that doing so enriches our societies. It will always be a tradeoff, though, and it's important to understand that.
Consider the word "discrimination". Without that word, we can not discriminate between "good" and "bad". We do not want to live in a world without discrimination. We should always strive to discriminate in such a way as it makes the world a better place. We wish to avoid behaviour that works against our interests and encourage behaviour that works for our interests.
To that end, we specifically discriminate in certain situations so that we accommodate minority groups in a way that we feel enhances our society. It should not be a surprise if we occasionally get this wrong and I strongly discourage people from assuming that the "right" answer is easy to determine. It is important that we think very carefully about which things we wish accommodate (minority representation of gender, sexual orientation, race) and things which we do not wish to accommodate (hate speech, violent behaviour, and GWT :-D).
P.S. I hereby apologise for my horrible characterisation of Java and GWT. I actually don't mind it that much...
Valid points. I have used the example of a lone vegetarian joining a team with a tradition of eating together at a steak house. In my mind, it would be a reasonable accommodation to stop doing that once a vegetarian is hired -- low cost to switch, highly obnoxious not to.
I find your example of communication style to be trickier. It feels in-between to me. I would agree that some elements of communication style should not be changed to accommodate an inflexible newcomer. On the other hand, when people talk about the benefits of diversity, communication style is a really large element! You know what you enjoy about your current boys' club style -- but it might very well be better if you switched to something more professional even in the absence of onboarding someone new. You won't know until forced to by the introduction of diversity, and that's true in many different subtle areas, not all of which you're going to have any chance of spotting in advance.
The same argument could be applied to just about anything. Perhaps GWT would be a really great fit for what you're working on, but you won't know until you try it. That's far less likely than a communication style change, though, so it's probably one of the costlier and less likely things to try to accommodate.
I agree that the question of whether or not to accommodate a difference is not always answered with "yes!" It depends on the accommodation required.
I don't understand why modern society doesn't understand/want to believe that men and women have different career interests than men. Men and women value things differently, and it's not all because of society.
What I don’t understand is the obsession to draw conclusions as soon as possible. We just don’t have the data yet. From my experience developers are still seen as black magicians by other roles. Being initiated is having been a weird unpopular boy which used computer since he was young. It’s slowly starting to change, and maybe real trends will emerge in 20 years, but why the hurry?
Our only responsibility is that we provide welcoming environment and equality of opportunity. But I may be missing some US context on the obsession here.
There's a whole lot of people who have studied fields that are irrelevant to today's industry needs and have ended up with no real marketable skill. Various forms of activist movements have money in it.
Modern developed societies have solved most of the serious, basic problems making it easier for a group of people to capitalise on solving more lofty problems. I have seen someone who did a degree in communication studies or something like that going after video games for sexism and raise millions for the cause.
This trend will probably continue until we have more serious things to worry about. This is very eloquently described in "Fate of empires" by Sir John Glubbs.
Wasn't beating about the bush. I just forgot her name. Either way, her name wasn't important enough for me to look it up. The point was, someone who has no credentials about gender equality, video games or psychology were raising millions to fix a "problem" outside her expertise.
Animals have behavioral differences between males and females, I also don't understand why it's so hard to believe that humans will have differences between the genders as well.
i hate this argument so much! it has been thrown in my face soooooooo many times...
it's the go-to excuse managers and sales people use to tell a woman in IT that she's weird for doing what she does.
even in teams with 90% men, it was almost never the men in the team that were the problem, but almost always those looking in on the team: managers, sales people, marketeers, project managers, journalists, ...
please, stop telling women they are weird for wanting to work in IT or for enjoying their IT job.
Saying that the disparate representation between genders in technology industries is due to innate differences is not telling women they're weird for working in tech. It is not a statement about those women who go into tech, it's a statement about the aggregate choices of women in society as a whole.
I don't know what your intent was in writing this comment, but trying to frame any attribution of career choices to gender as a personal attack is a common tactic to try and shut down discussion on the topic.
Woah there, the person you're replying to didn't once use the word "weird" or any synonyms thereof.
They said that men and women tend to have different broad interests. But that doesn't preclude women from having an interest in tech. He's making a statement on statistics, not making a value judgement about anybody.
I never said that, or claimed women have no place in IT or don't belong in IT or anything of the sort. I said men and women value things differently, so you will naturally get disparities in career paths. That doesn't make a male teacher weird because he's vastly outnumbered, nor does it make a woman weird for wanting to get into STEM or IT... It just means on the whole....men and women are different and -most- men and -most- women like different things than each other, completely detached from any societal norm, and there's nothing wrong with that.
We should tackle sexism where it exists, but we can't tackle it properly if we're trying to say everyone is the same...because they aren't.
I don't think that the comment above was speaking in hard and fast rules. They were more making the point that men and women may generally have different interests and that those interests will impact career choices. There wasn't any value judgement about women getting into IT being weird, but more a statement that a 50/50 split may not be feasible if the incoming pipeline is 70/30 due to the interests of those respective individuals.
If you have people telling you that you're weird for your interests, then they're likely either self-conscious or an ass. That goes for most generalizations that evaluate skill or ideas based on the attributes of the person vs. the merit of the idea itself... but that is a different discussion :)
I think it's the people in power are applying the usual divide and conquer technique: they add more women to tech, alienate men and women and keep them busy fighting each other. How to alienate them? By giving special preferences to only one group. This is a textbook technique.
I'm all for equality of opportunity, remove unconscious bias and creating a welcoming environment for all groups, including women. But equality of outcome I think pretty quickly breaks down. If we force 50% of software engineers to be women, we'd pretty quickly run out of women. This cascades as well, as we're not getting gender balance for CS enrollment in colleges either.
I worked with a few women in software development. 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women. "Men are more honest and straightforward, women more jealous and backstabbing". Their words, not mine.
But since the whole upheaval of women in workplaces that flowed to Europe from US, I have the feeling that this sentiment has changed.
That anecdote tells you precisely nothing; women who prefer working in all-female teams, etc, etc, have already been weeded out. Talking to people in the industry is sampling from a population of people who probably don't see a problem regardless of the actual situation.
It tells you that the men in the team weren't treating her like crap. And this is exactly what is always discussed, that being a lone woman in a group of men is toxic, discriminating, etc. The women I work with didn't have this issue.
Sure, I read some horror stories, mainly from US. But that doesn't mean that as a women you can't work pleasantly in an all male environment, as my experience clearly shows.
> 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women.
It's not comparing all-male to all-female teams, but all-male to teams with any women. As you say, There are roughly zero all-female teams in tech[1], but the proportion of any-female teams is much much higher.
[1] Yes, I know there are teams who have explicitly sought after this for ideological reasons, but theyre a rounding error.
> I worked with a few women in software development. 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women.
There are far more male bosses than female bosses. Accordingly, assuming bad bosses are relatively rare, it's far more likely every female boss you've ever had is awful than every male boss you've ever had is awful. This is just probability.
Let's take an example. Suppose 10% of bosses are awful, regardless of gender. Further suppose that due historical societal reasons, only 20% of bosses are female. If you've had 3 different bosses in your career, there's a far likelier chance that every female boss you've had is awful (3.94%) than every male boss you've had is awful (1.4%). (I'll leave it as an exercise to derive these numbers).
So, even if men and women are just as likely to be awful, you're nearly 3 times as likely for all of your female bosses to be awful than all of your male bosses to be awful simply due to the fact that women are under-represented.
This probability may explain at least some of this common and sad bias against female bosses.
No, it doesn't. It would require all-male teams to be substantially more common than teams with 1 or more women. It's not clear to me that this is the case (it's very much not my experience: 1/6 teams I've worked on have been women-free).
If your average team size is 5 people, then on average, the gender breakdown in your company is 72% male/28% female. I assumed 80/20, so yeah, it's still pretty accurate.
This doesn't hold up to scrutiny, since the opposite situation would also occur. People are also nearly 3 times as like for all of your female bosses to have been good, and exclusively had bad male bosses.
If fact, if 10% of bosses are awful then there will be far more people who have exclusively had good female bosses than bad female bosses.
P(all your female bossses awful) = P(awful boss)^(number of female bosses)
P(all your male bossses awful) = P(awful boss)^(number of male bosses)
The lower the number of male/female bosses, the greater the probability of all of them being awful. The opposite (probability of all of them being not awful) increasing is also true.
This is generally known as a small numbers fallacy[1]
Being in groups of the opposite gender has the benefit that you can opt out of inter-sex competition. Men compete with men. Women with women. A woman working in a otherwise all men team have no other woman to compete with which can be a great freedom. If a person explicitly talked about "jealous and backstabbing" I would interpret it as terminology of inter-sex competition.
More than one baby-boomer woman I know has said that every time she has a male boss, things are okay, and every time she has a female boss, the whole office gradually goes insane. I'm in particular thinking of my aunt, working in banks (all of her peers were women), but I've heard it elsewhere too.
But then again, it's anecdata. I try not to take it seriously (I mean, I take it seriously about the individual's experience, but not as a description of large-scale patterns). But also when people have just-so stories about how male bosses are toxic to female underlings, I have the same "maybe that was true for you, but I don't see any reason to generalize" reaction.
I am from Europe. I keep hearing the same things. Although it is anecdotal and from other people. At times it seems women have it constantly against each other focusing a lot of their time on social power plays. Myself I work in an environment with 97 percent male ratio so I do not have enough experience to comment on it myself. I would rather have it 50/50 at this point though. I think it would be less boring.
Women are unbelievably toxic if they achieve critical mass in a department. I cannot believe the level of petty conflict that my wife endures in her female-dominated PM team; my male-exclusive band of semi-autistic programmers seems like fiddler's green in comparison.
Not totally related but being the one socially adept developer on a team of semi-autistic devs is the absolute worst. I was also the only woman but it wasn't the gender ratio that bothered me as I've been on great all-male teams in the past. But my god is it hard to enjoy your workday when you're the only person on the team with social skills and nobody ever wants to talk to you or go out for lunch occasionally!
Are you sure it's the lack of social skills? Lot of my male colleagues don't socialize with women at work. They are completely normal outside of work. They just don't want to take risks in today's socio-political climate where any interaction is looked through hyper-deconstructed sexism lens.
> I'm sure this will be down voted, but it is what it is.
I totally agree with you but I hate that you had to end with that line. It's pointless and simply shuts down any useful discussion and implies that 'you disagree/downvote with me because I'm right'.
That was my thought as well. I read a good post, then my dominant thought was changed to a negative slant because of an entirely unecessary -- and probably very inaccurate -- note of paranoid self-defense.
I am a woman, and this pervasive opinion that women are leaving STEM fields because of toxic behavior feels more sexist to me than anything else. It seems to me that if you have a genuine passion for STEM stuff, it takes a lot more than a bad environment to completely redirect your career path.
Every woman I know with a genuine and deep interest in STEM subjects has had to deal with some level of toxic/sexist/whatever stuff in their life, and they persevered and dealt with it because they weren't going to let it get in the way of their passion.
It might sound harsh, but I don't feel terribly concerned about keeping these displaced women in STEM; if their interest isn't strong enough to overcome a bad environment, then maybe they just weren't that interested to begin with. That's not a bad thing, it just means that they misjudged the interest:difficulty ratio.
Of the cases I know of personally, most of these women ended up in a job working fairly close with STEM stuff, writing manuals, doing graphic design, etc, and are perfectly fine with those jobs.
To be clear, I'm not accounting for cases where an entire university or business or whatever is made up of toxic sexism, but that's been pretty uncommon in my experience in the US.
Women of STEM: if you've got a bad environment, do something about it! Tell your higher-ups, talk to people directly, seek a different position, endure what you can, and for God's sake stand up for yourself.
tl;dr the implication that most women in STEM can't handle a toxic work environment without giving up entirely doesn't seem that progressive at all
NB disclaimer, most people I know are computer scientists, plus a few mathematicians, so maybe engineering is different
> Every woman I know with a genuine and deep interest in STEM subjects has had to deal with some level of toxic/sexist/whatever stuff in their life, and they persevered and dealt with it because they weren't going to let it get in the way of their passion.
I grew up in an era when kids interested in STEM were "nerds" and were harassed, denigrated, and had lower social status. This changed when Bill Gates made his first billion. Suddenly, people realized that STEM was a ticket to the good life.
The title of the documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" was no accident.
A Seattle local comedy show "Almost Live" regularly ran skits about Microsoft engineers being socially inept and unable to get dates. (Of course, the joke turned out to be on Almost Live, as the super wealthy Microsoft engineers transformed the city.)
I suppose my point is that men who liked STEM had persevered in spite of the negative image of it.
Yes! Thank you, I failed to touch on this in my comment at all, it's not a gender-specific phenomena to have to push back against negative social aspects in order to pursue the things that truly capture your interest. I agree wholeheartedly.
Good point. As a male, I was heavily socialized not to go near computers. That was nerd shit. Everyone in my peer group came to know that I was into computers, but this interest was always something that I remember bringing a sense of shame, and something I had to downplay. It was a conscious effort to present myself as a normal guy who just happened to be good at using those things.
I recall a well-meaning teacher once publicly recognizing me as a “computer expert”, and the ensuing giggles and ridicule from my friends and peers for being a computer nerd.
While I would not say I was bullied, the “computer nerd”/“spending all your time in front of a computer” was somewhat of an expedient wildcard insult to be used whenever somebody needed to take me down a peg. In terms of group identities, I think the only labels that were lower on the social status ladder were being gay or being obese (exception if you could pull off “the funny fat guy”).
Maybe the millenials had it easier, but I think most people who are well established in their career by now came out of that environment.
Along those lines, it’s no wonder that many men in the field who emerged from that did not develop adequate social skills, and frequently demonstrate their lack of experience in interacting with women. Unfortunately, the social protocol errors are often either lumped in with sexism, or the dreaded “being a creep”, and it’s now fashionable for other (likely traumatized) people to publicly shame them, get them fired, and ensure that their infraction is part of the permanent record of the internet.
Was Almost Live the source of the skit "Studs from Microsoft"? Microsoft used to ship that skit as a demonstration video on their Microsoft Video API MSDN CDs.
EDIT: Found a Raymond Chen blog entry confirming that the skit was indeed from Almost Live -- and it featured Bill Nye.
My favorite is the 425 area code skit, with a snobby lady (in character) complaining about Renton being in the same area code as Bellevue. No one outside of the Seattle area would ever get that joke, however.
> this pervasive opinion that women are leaving STEM fields because of toxic behavior feels more sexist to me than anything else
I don't think it is sexist at all to claim that some people would not want to be in a field because of its hostile work environment. I sure wouldn't. Factually debatable? Sure. But sexist?
> It might sound harsh, but I don't feel terribly concerned about keeping these displaced women in STEM; if their interest isn't strong enough to overcome a bad environment, then maybe they just weren't that interested to begin with
I'm not a woman, but I am a person of color. And if anyone expressed those exact sentiments about people of color, I would never want to be around that person again. "I don't feel terribly concerned about keeping displaced minorities in my field. If they aren't interested enough to put up with racism, they shouldn't be here to begin with. It is their own responsibility to do something about it and fix the racist environment that they are in". Can you even imagine someone saying that? And yet, I hear the same sentiments being directed towards women constantly.
Ironically enough, you and I probably agree on most things. I don't think the STEM field is "toxic" or any worse than any other profession. At most companies I've worked, both management and other engineers made great efforts to be welcoming and friendly to women. That said, misogyny and hostile work environments do exist, and when it happens, we need to make sure we blame the culprits and not the victims.
To further complicate the matter, the idea of a "bad" environment is relative.
I've been on many all-male programming teams. Played football in high school.
From my experiences, those men tend to make fun of, poke, prod, and occasionally fight their way to agreement.
Comments were very direct. Abrasive at times. But usually got straight to the point.
I don't think I ever thought of any of it as needing "fixing". Quite the contrary, I think those men loved those other men.
But I could see someone of a different disposition being shocked at the crudeness, the brashness of it all and possibly thinking "it's toxic". It could be conflicting if someone wanted to participate in the team activity, but their approach didn't align with the existing members.
> To further complicate the matter, the idea of a "bad" environment is relative.
I see no relativism here.
As a description of your past experiences it was ostensibly a productive, functioning environment where every single member of every single group was comfortable communicating in that style.
As a general prescription for the most productive behavior for groups it's a poor model. As you point out, adding a single member with a different disposition can quickly turn the thing into a toxic environment.
Also, that model suffers from the same issue FLOSS projects do-- namely, it's hard to get any numbers at all on how many people never join up because the communication style isn't welcoming to outsiders.
Anyhow, if you posted this on Twitter I'm sure your description would quickly become transformed into an ostensible prescription by its algorithm as it got distributed for maximum outrage. But that's a problem with anti-human digital platforms, not a sign of ambiguity in what constitutes a productive work environment.
I’ve seen fist fights on sports teams when I was younger or blow out arguments in my marriage finally clear the air where a hundred previous logical, empathetic discussions only let the feelings fester.
There is something liberating about finally embracing the anger, rage and resentment that you feel and just letting it all out. Unfiltered.
And strangely, as I get older, I take it less personally if I’m on the receiving end. Sometimes people are overwhelmed and tired of doing mental gymnastics to keep things “nice”. I sorta get that now.
I’ve never seen a fist fight in an office. Probably not a good idea from a legal or liability standpoint.
But if two consenting adults want to physically fight in a controlled, fair environment, zero problems with that. And I could see how it could be therapeutic to release the resentment towards the other.
Having technical decisions made on the basis of who can punch the hardest doesn't seem sensible. But I don't think you are being serious at this point.
> If they aren't interested enough to put up with racism, they shouldn't be here to begin with
I did not say "put up with", I said "deal with", which includes many options other than accepting what you're given. If your workplace discriminates on the basis of race, you could report them for violation of anti-discrimination laws, lobby for stronger laws, leave the workplace for a better one, etc.
> It is their own responsibility to do something about it and fix the racist environment that they are in
Exactly what I just discussed, maybe in an ideal world such things shouldn't be your responsibility, but the only way to guarantee action is to take it. If someone pushes you into a puddle, you might be right to say that it shouldn't be your responsibility to remove yourself from that situation, as you did not put yourself into it, but I think most would agree that the right course of action is to deal with it yourself anyways.
I am not suggesting that the responsibility falls solely on women or minorities to deal with their own problems at all, but I am suggesting that they should take some agency of their own.
Do you have thoughts on whether or not the current discourse is socializing certain group identities to prematurely internalize a victim mindset?
My niece expressed an interest in taking CS, and two of the women present immediately launched into third-hand accounts of how toxic and sexist they have heard that the industry is. It pisses me off a bit that they are convincing an otherwise neutral and open mind that they are both unwelcome and that they’re already a victim in the making. If the goal is truly to get more women in the field, I think the twitter mobs and one-sided viral medium.com posts are doing way more to scare them away than anything else.
>I am not suggesting that the responsibility falls solely on women or minorities to deal with their own problems at all, but I am suggesting that they should take some agency of their own.
Great idea! Perhaps following your comment, women and minority groups will start to organize to protest against unfair and illegal treatment.
Practically no one endorses "equality of outcome" in itself. It's a question of whether disparate outcomes evidence disparate opportunities (findings like those in question suggest that they may not).
Gender quotas are basically enforcing equality of outcome. If the reason for disparity in some trades isn't discrimination but preferences (as this article strongly suggests) - gender quotas make both man and women less happy to satisfy statistics and ideology. It's insane.
BTW I wonder if people proposing gender quotas because of pay gap would also support gender quotas in hospitals to fight life expectance gap, and gender quotas in psychiatry to fight suicide percentage gap.
> As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument. Are there times when that is true? Absolutely. But, men do not have a monopoly on being jerks
I'd say the bigger point against the idea that women aren't in CS purely* because of men being sexist, is that this implies that male doctors and lawyers in the 60's and 70's were less sexist than male engineers of today. Does anyone actually believe this?
In the sense that if sexism is the major force that prevented women from going into IT, then the much higher sexism of doctors and lawyers in the 60s and 70s would have prevented women from going into those fields too. But women were far more in those fields then, than they are in IT now.
>I don't follow this argument. Levels of sexism in the 60s and 70s are irrelevant to decisions that women are making in the present.
The argument is not about that.
It's that "Those very sexist 60s/70s fields still had a lot of women going in, more than women in IT today. If women could go into those very sexist fields then, it's not sexism that keeps them out of IT today".
This is ridiculous, changes in the 60's led to a more gender balanced field, which obviously made for less sexism. Pretending that root causes don't matter isn't helping your case.
Aren't you then acknowledging that as a result, tech now is more sexist than law and medicine?
If so, I can't see where we substantially disagree. As I've repeatedly said, I make no claims about why the gender balance shifted in law and medicine in the 60s. You appeared to suggest that this had nothing to do with levels of sexism. I'm skeptical of that claim (broader societal attitudes are important too, not just the sexism level of lawyers and doctors vs. the sexism level of scientists and engineers), but it's not as if either of us has actually researched this in detail.
The key point is that tech now is disproportionately sexist, as you appear to acknowledge.
the highest levels of sexism I have personally seen are in Finance, followed by construction workers; the highest levels of complaining I have personally seen are in FOSS UnConferences and PhD level academia.
Could be more the other way around: in a really Xist field, there are fewer complaints because a) there are probably fewer [minority group] to complain, b) complaining feels riskier and less likely to achieve anything, c) complaints that do get made are more likely to be quickly shut down rather than amplified.
Gender disparity fell in those professions, while in roughly the same time frame, gender disparity dramatically increased in STEM. If women could put up with the sexism in those two professions, is it really plausible that sexism is the reason they didn't similarly push into STEM?
Engineers would have had to have been a lot more sexist to explain this data.
>Engineers would have had to have been a lot more sexist to explain this data.
I think in general among engineers there is a lot of awareness about sexism and diversity issues but that doesn't always extend to people on the periphery of the engineering world (I'm from non-software engineering world).
Tradespeople such a boilermakers, fitters and welders as well as suppliers, technicians etc don't always have the same attitudes. These are people you have to work closely with on engineering projects which are often in remote locations like mines, construction sites etc where management is not typically present (or visible). Attitudes are improving, for example its not common these days to see pornography in site sheds and similar out on construction sites, 10 years ago this was rife, but I still feel culture out on sites is maybe 5 to 10 years behind where it is in the office.
My sister and I are both engineers (I'm Chem/materials and she is a mech. eng) the way she gets treated and I am treated there is a noticeable difference. People visiting her office have done things like assume she is a secretary and ask her to fix them a coffee this has happened in last 5 years so I think there are still some strides to be made in the engineering world.
> People visiting her office have done things like assume she is a secretary and ask her to fix them a coffee this has happened in last 5 years so I think there are still some strides to be made in the engineering world.
Absolutely, but the question being debated is whether this is worse in STEM than other professions. Every profession still has strides to make for true equality.
How could it not imply it? That's when women started entering those fields en masse and really increasing their numbers. Going by the "the problem is men being sexist" reasoning, that they were able to do this successfully implies that the lawyers and doctors in charge then were less sexist than engineers today.
I don't think the field is sexist. I think fewer women choose to study and excel at it. The field is open to whomever wants to have a go at it. Due to "corporate diversity policy" I think (as a man) have less of a chance of actually breaking into software engineering than, say, 10 years ago.
I mean, that doctors and lawyers were substantially less sexist compared to engineers in the 60's and 70's also strikes me as less than plausible, though I'll grant that'd be a closer competition than comparing them to engineers now. Do you have any evidence of an advantage there?
But the 60's and 70's are when the representation levels started really diverging. That's the key part.
That they may be less sexist now, after having achieved gender parity or something close to it, is hardly unexpected. Of course a field with roughly even numbers is usually going to be less sexist than one dominated by one gender or another.
You'll have to spell the argument out. My claim is that relative sexism in STEM puts women off now. This does not require me to commit to the claim that relative sexism was a dominant factor in women's career choices in the 60s. Note, however, that the issue is sexist attitudes in society as a whole, not just engineers being sexist. Even if 60s lawyers are just as sexist as 60s engineers, the idea of a female lawyer (especially a junior one) may still be more socially acceptable.
Asserting that a gender balanced field is less sexist than a gender imbalanced one isn't very interesting. The interesting part is that law and medicine used to be just as gender imbalanced, and then steadily became less so.
This is the crux of the issue that you're avoiding grappling with. Saying "well I don't care about the history" is irrelevant, it's still the most important part whether you personally care or not.
It's like looking at which countries are desirable to immigrate to without grappling with patterns of development, despite the obvious fact that the biggest thing that makes countries more desirable is being rich/developed.
Measuring these things by outcomes is always wrought with errors. For example, how do you compare women's interest in medicine 50 years ago to their interest in comp sci today? If raw interest is low even a trivial scale issue might dissuade you.
It's also dangerous to treat all software development the same. I'm my experience women tend to be more interested in human facing parts of software like web and ui development, but less interested in the back end parts. Is this the result of sexism? Maybe, but regardless I bet the gender stats are very different if you consider front end as different than back end development.
I (and others from looking at some sibling comments) didn't see your comment as being about gatekeepers, but rather about the environment being perceived as unfriendly towards, so women seeking out different fields.
This article implies that the correlation between gender-opportunity and representation in STEM is a causation.
Look at the chart in the article, look at the countries on each end of the opportunity spectrum. There are many obvious economic, societal, and cultural differences between the countries on one side and the other of that spectrum.
To take this correlation and use it to forward a sexist idea (that women PREFER
different, often worse-paying, fields and that's why there's less women, and thus we don't need to change anything in our industry's culture) is the reason I would downvote this article and the OP's comment.
Please don’t spread moral panic by labeling other people’s worldviews sexist. It does not sell your argument but only serves to polarize the debate.
I know a lot of women in tech who feel uncomfortable with all the special treatment they get — entire conferences dedicated to “women in tech.” I find the idea so patronizing, just like I would a “men in daycare” conference. It is an extension of coddling the incapable and meek servile woman. Get out of here.
It's not patronizing. We have, e.g., men in nursing conferences (https://www.aamn.org/2019-annual-conference). I don't find that patronizing as a man. It makes sense for a field where men are a minority.
I don't find the concept of a women in tech conference inherently patronizing, but having attended several of them I wish they had more technical talks and less focus on fluffier topics. I swear half the talks at the Grace Hopper conference (which is about women in COMPUTING, not just tech) in NYC this year were about diversity and inclusion, which is a worthy goal but not something I find particularly interesting in a conference lecture. There were probably 1/3 tech talks, 1/3 diversity and inclusion and 1/3 business-related when it's supposed to be a conference about computing. It just felt it was feeding into the negative stereotypes about women being unsuited for technical roles or not caring about tech itself but just the more social aspects. I came for the cool tech talks!
An earlier partner of mine went to such a conference. “Women in computing.” There was a show of hands who wanted to be a programmer etc; basically none did except my partner. She left feeling more of an outsider.
To take a perfectly rational conclusion and call it sexist is quite a deriding trick, isn’t it?
You’d need to try really hard to disprove different interest of men and women, as literature suggests differences from a very young age, even before those children have chances to meet their peers.
You’re just giving alternative explanations, which given the left side of the chart are much, much less likely. The economic argument also doesn’t make sense. STEM jobs may be among the highest paying ones, but certainly are not THE highest (not to mention the amount of effort compared to different high pay jobs).
You're taking an idea, that there are differences in preference between men and women and calling it sexist. Why is it sexist? Do you not think there are difference in preference between men and women? That perhaps the different levels of hormones would result in a difference in temperament? For example higher levels of testosterone leads to more risky and aggressive behavior.
Implicit bias also guides interests and choice. Many women I meet today simply did not consider the possibility of an engineering career, not that they were forced out of it.
We look to outcome equality to gain some kind of insight into this.
> Many women I meet today simply did not consider the possibility of an engineering career
And I'm sure many men simply did not consider the possibility of a career in female dominated professions, like nursing or elementary education. I think there's certainly something to the idea that we internalize stereotypes and that can restrict our options, but I'm skeptical that it generally explains large differences in career preference today.
For example, women were once stereotyped as not being doctors or lawyers, but that didn't seem to stop them from joining those fields en masse. If internalized stereotyping didn't matter enough to stop them then, for those fields, why does it matter now for engineering?
Well it's certainly an open question, although here's something that's just struck me. Careers that were dominated by women were in the orbit of doctors and lawyers, those being nurses, paralegals and secretaries. If you're thinking about being a nurse, why not consider being a doctor? I'm not sure STEM professions had these associated careers.
Media representation? Female lawyers and female doctors are fairly common in media. Female engineers, not so much, and definitely not in a context where the women are not deviating from social norms (you need to be a tomboy, you need to be geeky, you need to be "not like those other girls" etc.)
Representation is important - MLK convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay on Star Trek because she was, at the time, the only black educated woman in a leadership position on television.
How big a hit?
Halt and Catch Fire fictionalized a lot but two of the four leads were software and hardware engineers, The Expanse has the primary hardware/software hacker on the ship as one of the four main characters but it's a woman, Person of Interest had two of the four main characters be software programmers, one a man and one a woman, Mr Robot has software developers for most roles besides gangster and law enforcement, one of the four or five primary characters on 12 Monkeys was a scientist/engineer but a woman, Westworld has the scientist as the main human character for the first season and a different one for the second, most of what they do looks like software programming, Chernobyl showed a lot of engineers in the nuclear control room, trying to fix things afterwards.
There's also McGyver, Neo & Trinity, Rey also doesn't seem to have her thumb in the middle of her hand, David Lightman, Tony Stark--in fact, Marvel is chock full of male engineering types; Beast, Hulk, Reed Richards, Peter Parker.
There are plenty of female lawyers and doctors who aren't main characters in television shows, and where being a lawyer or doctor is not a defining characteristic of how feminine they are.
The same cannot be said for the legion "quirky female hacker" characters that exist in many TV shows.
Big bang theory, for example, has mostly male nerds. The core Silicon Valley engineering team is male. There are of course exceptions but male and female engineers are not represented equally in media.
>For example, women were once stereotyped as not being doctors or lawyers, but that didn't seem to stop them from joining those fields en masse. If internalized stereotyping didn't matter enough to stop them then, for those fields, why does it matter now for engineering?
The fields you mention made serious efforts to counter sexism. STEM hasn't, yet.
STEM hasn't made serious efforts to counter sexism? That starkly contrasts with my observations. For the entirety of my life (I'm over 25) that I can remember I've encountered programs and initiatives working towards getting women into STEM. All of the companies I've worked at instituted hiring policies that favor women (e.g. giving women 2 chances to pass a technical phone screen instead of one). And we're not alone in this. Microsoft and Intel have both instituted policies of witholding bonuses unless diversity quotas are met, and Facebook gives recruiters more points - which count towards performance reviews - for recruiting diverse candidates[1].
These kinds of top-down initiatives are well and good, but the real problem is cultural. You only have to read this discussion to see why women don't want to work in STEM.
> What are the "serious efforts" made by medical and law industries that got women into these professions that STEM has not employed?
More than that, what "cultural changes" did they enact? From what I've read of the history, culture only shifted after women achieved rough gender parity. Cultural shifts follow demographic shifts, not vice versa.
And even now, gender disparities exist that can't be explained by sexist theories. For instance, why is surgery dominated by men and pediatrics dominated by women?
Sexist theories have a lot of holes like these gender disparities within fields and the gender equality paradox that's the subject of this article. And yet, there's a theory that explains all of the data we see:
Medicine and Law have made serious efforts to counter sexism? Like what?
Law is essentially the definition of the "Old Boys Club" and as for Medicine... I used to work in the medical field for a while. Go ask any (female) surgical nurse about the supposed efforts to counter sexism in the OR.
Woman lawyer from Wall Street here. That’s about as “Old Boys Club” as it gets. When I left law to pursue tech I figured it couldn’t possibly be as bad as what I was leaving behind. I was so wrong. Silicon Valley is infinitely more difficult to navigate and less welcoming.
The major difference (in my opinion) is that the Old Boys Club owns it. They know they’re not welcoming to women and for the most part they don’t care. But Silicon Valley, for whatever reason, absolutely insists that they’re welcoming and that it’s all in our heads. The Old Boys Club was frustrating but Tech is infuriating.
Would you care to give some examples, what behaviour is so unwelcoming in the tech world?
Did you consider other reasons than sexism for the environment that you perceive as unwelcoming? E.g., I guess the ratio of introverts vs. extroverts is pretty different between Wall Street law firms and software developers.
Given the rampant discrimination against men that exists in the modern tech sector and that even stating "maybe women naturally prefer to do other jobs than tech" gets you fired, what exactly do you have in mind that would make it even more welcoming?
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. Your comment here broke several of the site guidelines. Would you please review them and stick to the rules when posting here?
What it means to be "welcoming" is rather subjective. But there has been widespread adoption of discriminatory policies designed to make women get offers more frequently than men as I have shared in a previous comment [1]. I think this is what was being referred to when the above commenter talked about companies being more welcoming to women.
The extent to which discrimination makes tech more welcoming is debatable. It does have the immediate effect of increasing the number of women in tech roles, but it does so at the expense of putting them in an environment where they know that their male co-workers were held to a different standard and vice versa.
Edit: your comment history shows a lot of political and ideological flamewar comments, and we've already had to warn you about not taking HN threads into gender war. If you keep this up we're going to have to ban you, so please don't.
I'm not saying that law and medicine are perfect. But they were once just as stereotypically male as tech is now, and yet have radically shifted their gender balance. Fifty years ago people would no doubt have told you that women just weren't interested in becoming lawyers or doctors. Now a majority of attorneys in the US are women, and more women are enrolling in medical school than men.
> But they were once just as stereotypically male as tech is now, and yet have radically shifted their gender balance.
You say this as if the fields themselves decided, but it could just as easily be that women pushed in harder.
> Fifty years ago people would no doubt have told you that women just weren't interested in becoming lawyers or doctors.
Again, what was the difference? You've suggested a relative difference in sexism at the time, but I've seen no data suggesting this. It just looks like a guess on your part.
I think you are reading a lot into my comment that isn't there. I don't know exactly why women fifty years ago made the decisions that they did. You don't, either.
You're being vague and deflecting here. In one comment you suggest that the cause is law and medicine being relatively less sexist, and here you just say, "well, we don't know why they did what they did." Well, which is it? What basis do you have for your earlier point?
> You don't, either.
Why would you even say this? The comment you responded to didn't have me asserting a reason why. It's like you're attacking a strawman.
>. In one comment you suggest that the cause is law and medicine being relatively less sexist
I claimed that this is the case today. You are the only one of us making any assertions whatsoever about levels of sexism in the 1960s and 1970s, which are irrelevant to choices women make now.
So you're suggesting the lawyers and doctors in charge back in the 60's and 70's were more progressive and less sexist than engineers in 2019? Really? That's what you're going with?
TulliusCicero is saying that the 60s and 70s were the period when women entered those fields en masse. Hence you should compare the state of those fields in the 60s/70s to the CS field now if you wanna determine sexism as the cause of entering/not-entering a given field.
It's implied by saying that those other fields made serious efforts to combat sexism back then, but CS hasn't made an equivalent effort now. What other reason would there be for such a discrepancy, other than being motivated by sexism?
I've served multiple times at SheTech (an event where we invite thousands of highschool girls to come learn about tech and jobs), and I've helped host at least five Hour of Code events at Adobe where we make sure half of those invited are female where we teach robotics. I've also spent a couple years teaching refugees how to code, and we make sure half of those students are female, as well.
I've never attended personally, but we also host an event yearly called "Girls Who Code."
Adobe has also partnered with a local dev bootcamp to hire intern graduates-- I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty confident that there's an emphasis on female graduates.
It sounds like informing everyone that these options exist is part of creating a more equal opportunity. If two people didn't have the same information for available options then there wasn't an equal opportunity.
I just hate that the emphasis seems to be strictly based on careers with high income. There is no focus spreading equality or equity or informing everyone when the career is about social good, life satisfaction, or blunt quality of life.
Yes, don't forget all the shitty careers, with long hours, danger, and significant health hazards. Not much equality of outcome on those either. Somehow no one is claiming sexism is the cause of disparity for those.
Actually, a lot of people are saying that sexism is the cause of disparity in those cases. It's a commonplace observation that sexism harms men as well as women.
Historically, the professions you're alluding to have been closed to women by men. So for example, the reason that women couldn't serve in the military until relatively recently is not that women used their power and influence within society to get a pass on military service. Rather, it's that men didn't want to let women serve.
I'd hope if women had thought about the serving example they would have made the same choice out of a sensible respect for setting up the future. A society that keeps their women from dying needless deaths has a reproductive advantage over societies that send them into the meat grinder - the protective society can produce more children after the conflict. From a quick and lazy glance at some statistics [0] losing a young man in 1945 is statistically losing a man, losing a young women is more like statistically losing 6 people (1 now, 5 next generation). The baby boom doesn't work out as well as it did if a big group of women just died off.
Equality of opportunity to die serving a country is all very well, but until men figure out how to operate wombs without women there are practical differences when deciding who is risks probable death. The situation has probably changed now that growing populations no longer looks like an easy win but the calculus goes a bit beyond 'men just didn't like the idea'. Men didn't like the idea because it is an objectively bad idea in an era where population really mattered. The women probably agreed with that one on the whole.
Wow, extremely insightful point, and did not realize that! But it makes sense when we consider it from a biological standpoint: men are needed "temporarily" in the reproductive process to put it mildly. Perhaps this explains the slow growth of the soviet union after ww2 (# of women killed serving in the military)?
>Men didn't like the idea because it is an objectively bad idea in an era where population really mattered.
This is an argument that's rarely if ever been used against allowing women to serve in the military. I think it's the argument that you'd like people to make rather than an argument that people have actually historically made.
More broadly, if you see women primarily as baby machines, then military service should be the least of your worries when it comes to fertility.
Well it is is pretty obvious to me that in day to day practice women were kept out of the army because (as sibling poster) they are physically worse fighters than men by raw strength. But it is also pretty obvious to me that over the centuries brilliant military planners would have regularly thought about using women on the front lines and then rejected the idea for much better reasons than 'I'm a sexist'. The stereotypes here aren't arbitrary, an unbiased thinker would have reasonably reached the same practices.
And we can't really say for certain that what everybody thought was controlling what happened. What everybody thinks and what actually happens in, eg, banking and finance are completely different. The people in control are not the people talking on the street.
> More broadly, if you see women primarily as baby machines, then military service should be the least of your worries when it comes to fertility.
Call me old fashioned but I'm ruling out the idea that men are the primary baby making engine of humanity.
On your actual point; the fact that there are other things to think about doesn't stop people thinking about this specific thing. The US lost 400,000 servicemen in WWII without really even seeing a foreign invasion; those sort of numbers absolutely should involve someone asking the question 'who can we most and least afford to lose?'. The militaries of the world are not warm and happy-go-lucky organisations. They ask quite unpleasant questions all the time.
I think you are just advancing your own arguments against allowing women to serve in the military here, not actually giving any evidence that these arguments were widely used in opposition to women's military service. That's a tangent.
Incidentally, in the broader context of this thread, this is exactly the kind of fringe content that just might give women the impression that the tech community has a sexism problem.
>Call me old fashioned but I'm ruling out the idea that men are the primary baby making engine of humanity.
I think you misread. I said "if you see women primarily as baby machines", not "if you see women as the primary baby machines".
Really? Below is a list of the top 8 most dangerous jobs in the US. Which ones do you think would have equal gender representation if there was no sexism?
Is that really that obvious? Given that nursing and nursing assitant jobs are amoung the most dangerous and the fact that the vast majority of those jobs are filled with women, your willingness to erase an important aspect of a headline is a good example of the bias that this entire discussion is centered around.
Yes, it is obvious. I did not try to erase anything, I posted the source without being asked for, and pointed out the discrepancy and my interpretation of it, which was correct, as you can see in this other article: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/01/08/most-dangero...
I said "erase" meaning "erase from your attention as an important aspect of the headline", but ok, poor word. You still chose to ignore that important point because you've chosen it was unimportant. Why? It helps you reach a conclusion because you want that conclusion. I provided you with two professions that run contrary to your view and you're ignoring that as well.
Fair enough. I believe those stats are skewed by a small number of pilots doing relatively dangerous kinds of flying. In any case, yes, more women would be doing these jobs if sexism were eliminated.
You are talking about a hypothetical scenario where all sexist stereotypes are eliminated. It’s obviously silly to guess at what the numbers would be. I see no reason to expect a precise 50/50 gender balance in every one of the listed fields. Conversely, I would also not expect to see the massive disparities that we see currently.
The problem in STEM isn’t that the gender balance isn’t exactly 50/50. It’s that substantial numbers of women are discouraged from STEM careers by sexism.
First of all, note that this argument works both ways. You also can’t put exact numbers on how many women we’d expect there to be in the industry in the absence of any sexism whatever. So how do you know that there’s no problem?
But actually, the question is quite easy to answer for me. I am more interested in sexism per se than in the gender distribution. When women in the industry infrequently report that they are experiencing sexism, then I’ll consider that we’re well on the way to solving the problem. The current gender imbalance is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
> When women in the industry infrequently report that they are experiencing sexism, then I’ll consider that we’re well on the way to solving the problem.
This is the fox guarding the henhouse. There is no incentive for women to ever stop crying "sexism!" if this is the criterion in use.
I think you're being overly literal, not to mention suspicious. I'm not suggesting that we turn off our critical faculties and reflexively believe everything that we hear. At the moment, we'd have to reflexively disbelieve everything women tell us to conclude that there's no sexism problem in tech.
And now that women can serve in the military, it's time to update the Select Service law so it requires both men _and_ women to register on their 18th birthday.
Sure. Do you think that there are many people who both (a) agree with the registration requirement in the first place and (b) think that it should apply to men only?
I doubt that many 18 y/o males are fine with it since that doubles the chances that they'll be forced to enroll in the military for very little pay. I'm sure most other people would prefer that 18 y/o males continue to be the selectively signed up and have no problem with females not doing the same. Imho though, either everyone should be forced to enroll or no one should - most military workers are support staff anyway.
Speculate as you please. This is an extremely obscure issue, and I suspect that very few people have a strong opinion on it. (If I'm wrong about this, it should be easy to point to a counterexample.)
It is an extremely obscure issue because the vast majority consider women signing up for the draft to be ludicrous, and dismiss the conversation thereafter.
Historically, the military mostly drafted people, especially if we look at the last 100 years. Conscription has very little to do with choices, and male only conscription has a long history.
There is a good discussion to be had over why conscription has mostly been male only. Is it powerful men wanting to get rid of young expendable men in some form of evolutionary benefit to themselves? It it because of historical benefit of muscle differences? Did women use their power and influence within society to get a pass on conscription?
Men did not choose to be forced into the military. People do not generally chose to be forced to the front line and die. It is also worth mentioning that in the US, black males were proportionally drafted in higher rates than white males during the Vietnam war. Most people would agree that white men used their power and influence to get a pass on military service.
Maybe the first question to discuss is if being drafted is a benefit or disadvantage in term of power and influence.
Voluntary military service was also male only, so I'm not sure why you are focusing so much on conscription.
As you point out, the people in charge were all men. It was up to them to make the rules about who could or couldn't volunteer and who would or wouldn't be conscripted.
>Most people would agree that white men used their power and influence to get a pass on military service.
This perfectly illustrates my point. That is exactly not how women got a pass on military service. Thus, it misses the point to complain that men disproportionately do certain dangerous jobs. Women have been kept out of those jobs by men, and by sexist attitudes more broadly, not by some kind of inverse sexism that favors women over men.
> Voluntary military service was also male only, so I'm not sure why you are focusing so much on conscription.
Most worlds armies are conscription, and even the US army had conscription during the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. It culturally defines the military.
> This perfectly illustrates my point.
No it does not. Men as a group did not keep women out of conscription so men alone could get the privilege of being conscripted. It not a privilege. A better claim is that society pick which ever demographic is most expendable and force them to pick up arms during major conflicts. Young men, especially men of color, is consistently seen as expendable. It is racism, sexism, ageism, and a bunch more isms, and part of it favor women over young men.
During world war 2 almost all nations involved used prison population for conscription purposes. It is the most obvious place to find a lot of expendable people.
Voluntary military service still carries with it that culture and non-expendable people tend to not be near the front line.
Yes, but so what? The gender requirement on front-line service has never been limited to conscription.
>It not a privilege.
This is a well-worn argument. When women wanted to vote and join the workplace, they also got told that these things were terrible burdens that they ought to be glad not to have to bear.
Clearly, there are women who do want to join the military, just as there have always been men who want to join the military.
In a modern context, in the US and Europe, the question is not about whether women should be forced to serve in the military against their will, but whether they should have the same right to volunteer for service as men, and the same range of opportunities subsequently.
Until recently, the men in charge thought that they should not.
> Until recently, the men in charge thought that they should not.
Not men as a group. Rich old men thought that poor young men, disproportionately African Americans, should be forced into the military.
In modern context we still have remnant views that military is a punishment. Popular culture often use the trope that troublesome boys who don't behave get sent to military school so the boy can redeem themselves in the eyes of society. The concept of military service as a punishment directed at young men is still well alive. One never see the idea of sending misbehaving girls to military school.
In Europe most nation still have conscription. The question has been whether women should be forced to serve in the military against their will. To pick a few examples, both Sweden and Norway think they should, and thus we have conscription there for both genders. As the advertisements says, everyone has equal responsibility to server their nation. The word "responsibility" is used here to make the conscription sound nicer but it no less forced.
Of course it was men as a group. You only have to go back a few decades to get to a time when the majority of men, across social classes, found the idea of women serving in the military ridiculous.
I still don't see how the rest of your comment is relevant to this discussion. Again, the gender requirement was not specific to conscription.
>One never see the idea of sending misbehaving girls to military school.
Then we are at an impasse. Men as a group did not choose to force themselves at the threat of gun point to go into trench war fare and die. That is just ridiculous.
Young poor men has always been at the bottom of the social ladder.
The men who got forced into the trench war did not have a choice in who got drafted. People who society deems expendable and at the bottom of the social ladder do not have that power or influence.
The people who got excluded from military conscription were women, rich men and men with influence.
The usually social ladder puts rich men at top, women in the middle and poor men at the bottom. Sometimes described as a differences in bell curves during gender equality discussions.
Poor men, having no influence or power gets conscripted against their will.
Women, being in the middle, are exempted from conscription but can't volunteer.
Rich men, being at the top of influence and power, was exempted from conscription and also had the choice to volunteer (usually for officer or other high ranking positions).
No one denies that the small percent that makes up rich men have more influence and power with more freedom to choose during conscription. Men as a group however is both the poor and the rich. If we only look at the top then we ignore an already marginalized and vulnerable part of the population. Those at the bottom.
>Women, being in the middle [in terms of power and influence], are exempted from conscription
This is just a wrong analysis. Women didn't get our of conscription as a result of their power and influence. They were exempted from military service because almost all men, across all classes, were opposed to women serving in the military.
And this is the point where we disagree. Women didn't get conscription because they are not seen as expendable by rich men.
And you are wrong that almost all men, across all classes, were opposed to women serving in the military. Armies that are created by rich men at the top looks very different to those created by lower classes, such as resistance movements in Europe during world war 2.
Side note: it's interesting that it's these male-dominant fields that have the noble "serve" descriptor associated with them. Given that women have dominated the fields of educating children and nursing our sick, it seems that these are more deserving of the serving label rather than those who destroy.
I remember high-school guidance counsel lists being dominated by things like "actuarial" and "insurance salesman." After reading that I would have rather worked in a restaurant my whole life.
Absolutely had no clue what to go into and they didn't help much. Perhaps they were at a greater disadvantage because the internet revolution was about to hit.
If they aren't convinced it is a real option than they didn't have the same opportunity. Either way it isn't a problem that can be solved by pushing people into the field to create a more equal ratio.
How to distinguish between "I didn't know that was a feasible choice for me" and "I know what programming is like and I don't want to do that as a career"?
The majority of people fall into the first category, regardless of sex. There are a lot of people who with exposure might consider software development as a career, but didn't think of it as an option. For various historical reasons (exposure to programmable computers, video games, adults that can explain or teach programming, access in school, peers that program, role models, etc) the people that tend to realize programming is a career option and understand what that career might entail tend to be white and asian males. That isn't to say there aren't many white and asian males that also don't know programming is a career option.
Now that "tech" is so important and lucrative I'm sure this is changing to some extent, but this is a recent trend that's probably 5 years old at most. Tech wasn't viewed the same as it was now in 2012-2014 and felt like a much more risky and inaccessible field. Now it looks a lot more like any other high paying corporate job.
The Dot Net bubble in the 90s was arguably the biggest news story of the decade. Everyone knew there was tons of money to be had in tech, and stories of people landing jobs at startups after learning a little bit of HTML.
I'm aware of the dot com bubble. My point wasn't that people weren't making money, my point is tech looked risky and new, especially the web based companies that dominate now. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc were stable jobs but they were for engineers/nerds. There was money to be made back then of course but money isn't the only thing that makes jobs attractive. Social and cultural status and stability are important as well. A doctor is a safe, high paying, high status job. Tech is only just now starting to look that way to mainstream people.
I'm not sure I understand the question. As phrased I think you have a natural understanding of the difference. Are you asking how we measure that nationally?
In school way back in olden times, most of the girls in my class would say "oh, I hate computers," when the subject was brought up. Odd, because I loved them.
I don't hear this anymore from the grown-up-on-iPad generation.
Unrelated to the topic but can you even downvote in HN? I only have an upvote button. Does it have something to do with how much the HN equivalent of karma that you have?
> Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in
What?! Equality of outcome, as I've encountered it, is always downstream of individual choice. That is, it's up to the hiring committee to enforce gender parity by selecting from available applicants, and not up to educators or policy-makers to force equal amounts of women to be in STEM. No one has ever, to my knowledge, made the argument the way you represented it (except, ironically, incels calling for mandated marriage).
I'd have taken you more seriously if you hadn't straw-manned the shit out of equality of outcome.
"As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument. Are there times when that is true? Absolutely. But, men do not have a monopoly on being jerks, creating toxic work environments or harassing people"
This is a red herring. If you ask women they won't say their bosses were "jerks" or "toxic" (though a lot of time they are), they'll say they made them "uncomfortable", "un-accommodating".
It reminds me of a friend who got pregnant and left the STEM field because the dudes at her office made her feel like she was SUCH a huge drag on them. None of them were jerks, just not accommodating. Its a subtle but substantial difference.
"I'm sure this will be down voted, but it is what it is."
Actually, its the top comment, the popularity of this opinion among programmers is the crux of the issue. Nobody wants to work at a company where a majority of people think you are "unnatural" or an "outlier" for being there.
> If you ask women they won't say their bosses were "jerks" or "toxic"
Most women I know do exactly that though if you speak with them in a private setting?
I'll have to take your word for the rest of your opinion, as I don't know your friend nor her colleagues.
I'm a little surprised you expect them to be totally accommodating though. It's a professional setting after all. It's nice if you can create good friendships there, but expecting it is just asking for trouble
Coming from one of these countries to America, the answer seems obvious. STEM jobs have a HUGE differential in stability and status in those countries, so women put up up with much more patriarchal BS at the workplace to hold on to them.
My sister was a STEM worker in India. When she moved to America, she looked around to see writers with relatively safe, high-status job and switched out immediately.
Yes, women in America are "organically" picking non-STEM jobs, but that is because the jobs suck, the environments suck and people are assholes at these jobs. My sister loved the core STEM aspects of her job, but hated the culture of the companies she was stuck working with. This is not "equality", its hostile corporate culture.
Ask women and you'll find that most aren't interested in programming a computer all day. Which one could argue is a sane choice. If anything it's more sane.
Stop trying to make them feel like something is wrong if they don't have this inclination. Males and females have different preferences on average, some as early as birth[1]. This is not a bad thing.
For the ones that want to program all day, obviously they should be welcomed and any company that doesn't is doing themselves a huge disservice. In fact the best programmer I've ever worked with is a woman.
Most people, period, are not interested in programming a computer all day.
My girl child likes trucks, not Frozen, and the pressure from other adults to get her to conform and play with Disney-branded dolls is non-trivial and unrelenting. Ugh.
> Most people, period, are not interested in programming a computer all day.
That's true. But if you ask 1000 men and 1000 women if they want to program all day, you'll get a much higher % of men.
> My girl child likes trucks, not Frozen, and the pressure from other adults to get her to conform and play with Disney-branded dolls is non-trivial and unrelenting. Ugh.
I largely agree, Disney is overwhelming. Though no one has pressured or tried to make my daughter conform, other adults do mostly buy her girl typical things. Her cars, trains, dinosaurs, legos and the like mostly came from us (didn't buy any dolls, she got those from others). She likes trucks and Frozen. But mostly Paw Patrol. It's amazing, everything else is a distant 2nd to those pups!
A few years ago I was on a plane wearing a sweater with the logo of the major tech company I work at. The person sitting next to me was excited to talk to me about how he was trying to develop his son into an engineer. His son was like six. He was buying his son toys and games that tried to promote an interest in technology.
He also had a daughter. Similar age. He was not doing the same for her.
Perhaps these children had such a strong idea of what they wanted at a very very early age and the father was responding to that. But I find it more likely that the father held an implicit bias about what jobs his son and daughter should have and was providing support to push his son into tech.
When these two people graduate college and the son becomes a software engineer and the daughter doesn't it will be their choice. But it is not clear to me that it wasn't sexism that produced the circumstances for that choice.
> Males and females have different preferences on average, and do from birth[1]. This is not a bad thing.
I feel like this is a “??? Profit!” argument. Accepting that girl infants prefer faces and boy infants prefer trucks—what does that have to do with programming? Even within the context of traditional stereotypes about male/female preferences, what makes programming a “male” thing? The analogy that programmers “build things” is just that—your typical programmer is certainly not cut out to be a construction worker.
> The analogy that programmers “build things” is just that—your typical programmer is certainly not cut out to be a construction worker.
Building things is not just construction though. I mean, your average clock maker is not qualified to plumb a bathroom, but that doesn't mean he's not making things.
I don't have an opinion on this, but the idea that programmers aren't building something is a bit silly.
I've spent the last 15 years of my life working with engineering teams, hundreds of them, and I've never met a single one that worked this way. The opposite thing is true, unless you're fixated on literal in-the-same-room face-to-face interactions, in which case, what's your point?
You think programmers spend more time having face to face (as opposed to face to computer) interactions than people in health care, child care, social work, or education?
I don't believe the distinction between face-to-face and screen-to-screen is at all relevant. But: the programmers I work with spend lots of time in meetings, too.
Why don't you believe there can be any relation between female infants preference towards faces and female adults preference towards occupations with more face to face, people oriented interactions?
I don't, but I also don't care to debate it, and don't need to, because, once again, face-to-face interactions are also extremely common in professional software development.
Not common enough, it seems. As a former software developer, the mental isolation was one of the main reasons why I changed professions, and I feel much better for it.
Deep contemplation of technical problems while staring at a screen and talking to computers for hours on end often made talking to people after work exceedingly difficult
You’ve a skewed perception of “extremely common”. There are many jobs where pretty much the entire job is dealing with people - doctor, lawyer, clerk, marketer, teacher, ... in contrast, programmers can get a lot of stuff done (except coordination) just with computers.
This seems like shifting rationalization to me. They used to say women don’t want to be lawyers because it’s too much confrontation. Now women are well represented in law because it’s people oriented. Moreover, corporate law firms are 50% women, but that work is even more solitary than programming in a corporate environment. (Having done both myself.) You’re sitting in your office alone reviewing documents, writing briefs, or doing due diligence ten times as much as you’re in court or talking to clients.
Also, if programming is solitary as you suggest, why do tech companies discourage remote work and insist on culture fit, team building, collaborative work spaces, etc.? Much more so than law firms.
I've wondered about that. I think its part the youth culture of programming. Have to be in the clique to be acceptable. Counteracting the isolation of the programming process, with rules to try and create social interaction in the group.
The core activity of software engineering, programming, writing code, is a solitary activity. It's what people think of when they think of programming. It's what we spend hours being trained for, getting good at. Yes, in between writing software, we need to coordinate with others, so we have meetings. You'd really describe this overall process as being more people-oriented than thing-oriented?
I've heard the argument that somehow "actual coding is a relatively small part of being a software engineer," but unless you're a manager (of which there are many more women), the thing you're being trained for, the thing you spend most of your time doing, and the basis of how people perceive the profession, is sitting in front of a computer coding. You can describe any profession as people-oriented on the basis that one needs to work with others, but the key question is whether the basic activity of the job is a social one.
Regardless of whether the people-vs-thing distinction is significant or not, it seems inaccurate in a big-picture way to describe programming as people-oriented. Like, that's not what people mean when they draw that distinction.
According to research[1], on average, men tend to be more utilitarian while women tend to be more expressive; so your examples seem to be in accordance with those differences. Social nature is quite nuanced, so any one particular variable cannot be used to totally explain everything.
The purpose of the faces/trucks data point is just to illustrate that these differences start from birth. The larger argument is that the people-vs-things gap, and later, interest in computers specifically, basically remains stable throughout childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge...
I don't even know if the data is ready for us to draw any conclusions, but at the very least it seems to me we should find this to be an extremely interesting pattern, and use it to motivate hypotheses.
> Males and females have different preferences on average, and do from birth[1]. This is not a bad thing.
Sure, but it seems more than a little convenient that the male-chosen professions seem to generally pay significantly more, on average, than the female-chosen ones. Haven't there been studies that showed that women moving into a profession was actually associated with pay dropping?
1. Software is "eating the world", so a lot of software is being written leading to demand for programmers.
2. Programming scales really well. Software has zero reproduction cost and can reach a global audience almost instantaneously. So software companies can make a lot of money with relatively few employees.
What would be the mechanism for pay dropping when women enter a profession?
Some global masterminds reducing pay across multiple corporations across the board when they find out women are being hired in that industry?
Maybe it's just a matter of a sudden increase of supply of workers as women enter a field to meet the existing demand, driving wages down?
Is it because the women are being paid less, while the men are being paid the same as before?
The other responses covered some reasons for this, but also men tend to accept more risk, more willing to devote their life to work or have a myopic focus. Again, less sane one could argue. It's a less balanced life.
Men hit the extremes more often and as a result occupy more of the outlier positions. They're also over represented at the bottom of the ladder. i.e., the homeless and prison populations. But I don't see anyone claiming it's a conspiracy that men over represent this end of the spectrum.
more than a little convenient that the male-chosen professions seem to generally pay significantly more
It’s not a coincidence at all. Men place a higher priority on pay to the exclusion of all else, when choosing a career, than do women. Women are much more likely to choose careers with flexible working hours, benefits, and the potential to help other people (positive externalities).
When you look at it this way, it makes more sense that you’ll find men occupying all these different high paying positions. It makes a lot less sense that every employer deliberately pays less for women-dominated positions just because there are women there.
Given women are usually called upon to take more time to do unpaid labor like child-rearing, elder care, and holiday preparation, the fact women choose a flexible schedule is a result of societal expectations, and should be ruled out as a causal link.
Because, on average, men are given a lot less social pressure to "be there", they can more often take high-pressure jobs. Then the high pressure becomes a status symbol, and a gate to keep people with higher social obligations out.
As this phenomenon also causes a ton of burnout and is a cause for men's shorter lifespans, the whole thing needs to be actively taken down.
Women aren't just "called upon" to do child rearing, it's a huge part of their biology. In addition to giving birth and developing a strong maternal bond, women breastfeed their children which is not as convenient at work.
And as for high-powered careers being a status symbol, I would offer that a man's socioeconomic status is a major component in attraction for women. The reverse is true to far less of an extent. The stats on dating apps bear this out.
It's true that men tend to hold more of the physically dangerous professions, but the ones well known for being high paying, like software engineering or finance, generally don't fit that model.
Men in general, are more aggressive and assertive when it comes to pay increases. If a male dominated industry has sustained pay increases year on year, this is probably why. Over time, female dominated professions have wages that do not increase at the same rate.
Consider the reverse. A female boss, and a male being aggressive in wanting a pay rise. How do you think she would respond? Or even just consider a woman going to another woman for a pay rise. Do you think being more aggressive would work or not?
> In four studies, Bowles and collaborators from Carnegie Mellon found that people penalized women who initiated negotiations for higher compensation more than they did men. The effect held whether they saw the negotiation on video or read about it on paper, whether they viewed it from a disinterested third-party perspective or imagined themselves as senior managers in a corporation evaluating an internal candidate. Even women penalized the women who initiated the conversation, though they also penalized the men who did so. They just didn’t seem to like seeing someone ask for more money.
Rubbish "study". Nothing in there is based on reality, but people put in a test environment and asked to try and behave how they would in the real world. Reading written accounts of people asking for a pay rise and deciding what to do? How does that in any way mirror an face to face interaction? All 4 experiments are either on paper, or using video recordings. No statistics, very few people. Just another "gender gap" study that the media can cite to push the narrative.
How exactly would you measure social 'punishment' in response to negotiating in the real world? Contact random women's bosses right after they attempt to negotiate and ask them how they felt about it? You could set up interviews with real companies using your own candidates who will negotiate or not negotiate as you direct them, but then how do you gather data on the feelings of the bosses?
Some things can only really be tested in artificial environments.
>Some things can only really be tested in artificial environments.
What exactly do you think will be tested in that artificial environment when the environment itself (with what I'd hazard to guess quite a list of specifics, many of the "subtle and implicit, but influential" kind) is a central variable of the test?
If an observational study of this kind is deemed hard/improbable/impossible to set up - how hard do you think it is to get the artificial setup right? To account for - or even identify - all variables and preconditions? This is so easy to mess up and end up with basically meaningless data. (Yeah, I know - that doesn't mean it won't be published. Everybody raise your hands and shout "Replication Crisis"! :) )
It's not some conspiracy to pay women less. It works like this:
1. More people (women in this case) enter the profession.
2. Due to increased labor supply, pay starts to drop.
3. Men, placing a relatively higher priority on high pay, begin to avoid the profession.
That last point is sort of interesting. Men are strongly associated with their careers and level of pay. This is most of their status. It has a tremendous impact in the dating market. It is a key factor in the likelihood of divorce. Men follow the money; they don't get randomly assigned careers and they don't just follow their dreams. Men strongly seek the status of a high-paid job. To marry and start a family, that job is almost required. Women have no such trouble, so they don't need to prioritize earnings. Women can pick careers they actually enjoy.
> 2. Due to increased labor supply, pay starts to drop.
While this is plausible, the data on this isn't consistent. In fact, some professions that saw a large influx of women also saw wage increases. There are many variables at play.
> Sure, but it seems more than a little convenient that the male-chosen professions seem to generally pay significantly more, on average, than the female-chosen ones.
They don't. Most men have to work in order to earn money and attract a partner. You think all of us love sitting in open offices, following our Scrum Master? Of course not, we just don't have the luxury, as do women, to follow our 'passions' in lower paying jobs. We can't marry a breadwinner too easily. We don't receive subsidies from the state, unlike women who are a net tax loss. We aren't able to attract a mate simply by being young, as can women, due to biological differences between genders.
In Scandinavia, where salaries are progressively taxed and women have tons of opportunity to do what they want, women still choose not to sit in front of computers all day. Why the hell would they if everyone's salary is essentially equalized, regardless of whether you're a part-time teacher, social worker or a talented computer engineer working 60/hours a week. All salaries are taxed down to a median $75K / year, with the same health insurance, subsidized parental leave, etc.
Thus, Scandinavian women follow their 'passions' which is what most Western women do, as we see from their choices in college majors, all of which are unarguably 'easier' but pay less. If society were to equalize my salary at $75K year whether I coded all day or worked for a charity or NGO or a music teacher or artist or actor, I'd dump my programming job as fast as I could.
Look at India or China where far more women are into computers - they don't have the luxury of following their passion in dance or writing, because they don't have as much PRIVILEGE in their societies as do women in the West.
> We don't receive subsidies from the state, unlike women who are a net tax loss.
Source for this? I've never heard this claim before and on the surface it makes no sense. I'm a woman and I don't get any kind of special tax exemptions for it...
I'm looking at things in aggregate. The main idea is that men earn more, taxes are progressive, thus men pay more in federal and state income taxes than women, and women receive more benefits than men.
The tax revenue point can be proven by the same 'wage gap' arguments which are true in the sense that men work more and are paid higher, in aggregate, so pay more income taxes.
Second idea is that most federal and state benefits that are direct subsidies go to women: TANF, WIC, SNAP, Section 8, etc. Most people (i.e. women) who receive these benefits have children.
The biggest difference, can't remember where I saw it, is as our population shifts towards a higher median age, health care (and social security and other things like government pensions) become a larger share of net pay outs. Women live longer and spend more on health care.d.
But responding to your own question, no I don't think there are any special exemptions for working women, though it is creeping into US law in many states and soon Federally. Expenses like parental leave will be paid for by all taxpayers but be distributed mostly to women.
Obviously, some of these discrepancies are due to child care being a non-paid job, but it isn't the only difference.
> Ask women and you'll find that most aren't interested in programming a computer all day
I think this though itself is an artefact of a male dominated profession. The fact that working with software is "programming a computer all day" reflects a male preference and value system, and many people open acknowledge that it's quite harmful and often creates quite dysfunctional teams. We need better requirements, better communication, better documentation, more human approach to the whole process. I've talked to great women working in software development who say "I don't really care about the programming itself and I would never go home and do it for fun - but I love the other aspects of the job". Perhaps the nature of the job itself needs to change a bit for the preferences to adjust.
If I understand you correctly, people who like working alone on challenging tasks are inherently deficient and we need to drive them out of the workplace to make others more comfortable?
Isn't there a place for people good at thinking deeply about difficult problems on their own and coming up with effective solutions?
Yes, everyone needs to be able to communicate well to be part of an effective team. But there is also a role for deep thinking and introspection.
> If I understand you correctly, people who like working alone on challenging tasks are inherently deficient and we need to drive them out of the workplace to make others more comfortable?
You can't possibly think that this is what the person you are replying to is saying. But anyway, the point is that the conception of programming as a task suited to people who like to work in isolation is incorrect and harmful. One of the most common pitfalls of software development is writing software that no-one wants or needs. The solution to that problem lies in better communication. Of course, there are some kinds of programming problems that are suited to intense work in isolation. But most programmers probably need to spend more time talking to their non-programmer colleagues.
> You can't possibly think that this is what the person you are replying to is saying.
I do think that.
I think programming selects for people high in introversion and maybe even on the autistic spectrum.
I think some extroverted people find those people deficient and don't like working with them, and would like to change the working environment to be less comfortable for the introverts and more comfortable for the extroverts.
Programming culture selects for those people, to an extent.
If you're employed as a programmer, you're most likely being paid to solve other people's problems by writing code. If you can't communicate with those people, you'll never be able to do that successfully.
It's no conspiracy. A socially clueless introvert who's being paid a lot of money to do nothing useful doesn't have much to offer.
Of course you have to communicate with people to be effective.
There are also a lot of tasks where thinking deeply without distractions or interruptions for an extended period of time is the best way to come up with good solutions.
And even a lot of the best communication comes from taking time in quiet and deeply thinking about what you want to say and writing a good, convincing argument.
Thinking introverts have nothing productive to offer is just bigotry, and really makes you come across as a complete ass.
Of course you sometimes need quiet time alone to work on a programming task. The point is that you'd better also be capable of communicating frequently and effectively with your colleagues. For sure, many introverts are perfectly capable of doing that. (There are also many extroverts who can work alone when the occasion calls for it.) My point is that introversion is not a wholly adventitious trait for a programmer. Looking at the job description objectively, one would not expect programmers to skew strongly towards introversion.
I don't really follow the distinction you're drawing here. If you think that working in isolation is a bad thing, and most programmers should be talking to lots of people all the time, "people who like working alone on challenging tasks are inherently deficient" sounds like an accurate summary of that view. It seems perfectly reasonable for an introvert to say that they don't want to work that way, and that it would be bad for them if your views on how programmers ought to work become more common.
>"people who like working alone on challenging tasks are inherently deficient" sounds like an accurate summary of that view.
???
I don't say that they're deficient as people, or that working in isolation is bad per se. I'm just saying that people who like to work in isolation are unlikely to make good programmers (in the context of a typical programming job).
Personally, I switched to programming from academia, where I really did work in isolation on challenging problems. Now I spend most of my time talking to my colleagues to figure out exactly which not very challenging problem I should be spending my limited time on solving.
Nice shade, but here's some in return. If you frequently find your work challenging, then you are not a good programmer (or you are working on problems that aren't primarily programming problems).
Yes indeed. Women just don't want to work in one of the fastest growing and highest paying professions in America. They would much rather take lower paying jobs where you don't get free lunches and flexible dress codes at the office.
Well, you seem to be sarcastically implying the opposite: that there are hordes of women who want to move into a profession that’s in high demand with a low barrier for entry, but that… they’re not for some reason? Where are all these women? What are their reasons? I’m not even familiar with any anecdotal evidence that there are a lot of women who want to work as software developers but are unable to. Everywhere I’ve ever worked has fallen all over itself to hire women, even going so far as to lower the hiring bar to meet some diversity quotas, and has _still_ been unable to find these apocryphal women who are interested and capable of working as computer programmers but are unable to find the opportunity.
The problem I always have with this argument is "Why not medicine? Why not Law?"
Why is it that two professions that you'd naively expect to be just as sexist, if not far more sexist than STEM (Higher status, more of an "old boys club", established hierarchy that has positions like nurses for women, etc) have achieved gender parity, while STEM hasn't?
The legal profession is far ahead of STEM in addressing sexism. Many law firms have adopted the Mansfield Rule, which requires the pools of promotion candidates to comprise 30-50% women or other underrepresented groups: https://www.law.com/dailyreportonline/2019/09/06/more-firms-.... Major clients are imposing diversity criteria on outside counsel hired for their matters. Many major firms have 20% or more women in the equity partnership ranks. About a third of newly promoted partners are women. More than 30% of Fortune 500 GCs are now women.
That’s the result of decades of work, which started with affirmative efforts by law schools to achieve gender parity at the beginning of the pipeline. (Those efforts proved self sustaining. Once women didn’t have to swim upstream to choose law school—facing years of being in a small minority at the outset of their careers—efforts to recruit them specifically became unnecessary.) There is a ways to go yet before we hit parity, but I feel like in STEM folks are still litigating the issue of whether numeric parity should even be the goal. That question was settled in the legal field a long time ago.
> promotion candidates to comprise 30-50% women or other underrepresented groups
I think most tech companies would go into a full-blown panic if you imposed a quota of non-asians (who are something like 5% of the U.S. population) for technical positions.
There have been decades of efforts at the various stages of the pipeline. In the 1960s and 1970s law schools started admitting gender balanced classes. In the 1970s and 1980s there was a series of lawsuits as a result of which law firms began to hire gender balanced classes of entry level lawyers. The Mansfield rule is now directed at addressing remaining disparities in the partner ranks.
> In the 1960s and 1970s law schools started admitting gender balanced classes.
Be specific, because this could mean different things. Were the genders balanced because the applicant pool itself had become balanced, or because law schools started enforcing balance in admission, or a mix of both?
> In the 1970s and 1980s there was a series of lawsuits as a result of which law firms began to hire gender balanced classes of entry level lawyers
And what were the graduate pools like at the time, re: gender balance? Do you have sources that talk about these points, because it sounds interesting.
Part of the issue for tech companies is that there are fewer women with CS degrees, something they don't directly control, and have only modest at best influence over. And then at the university level, they've had issues getting more women to sign up, though I understand some schools have had more success than others.
Your proposal is to force numeric parity through discrimination when women comprise 20% of the people entering the field? Of course people oppose this: it's blatant sexism, and it is illegal.
From quite long time ago women are accepted to universities.
Yet to prove your point about "law being fixed long time ago" you refer to news from few months ago.
I didn’t say law was “fixed.” (To paraphrase Justice Ginsberg, law will be “fixed” when there are nine women on the Supreme Court.)
What I said was that recent progress is the result of work that started decades ago. Harvard law graduated its first women in 1953. But back then top women law graduates were still getting offers to be secretaries. (Justice Ginsberg’s story was not at all atypical for her cohort.) That, along with the prospect of joining a 90%+ male class in and of itself dissuaded women from pursing law. Law schools fixed that by making 50-50 classes an express goal, and then achieving that goal. Then law firms made 50-50 classes of incoming associates an express goal, and achieved that goal. Gender parity was achieved not simply by accepting women to law schools, but by actively seeking to admit gender balanced classes. But once that happened, the new ratio became self-perpetuating. When being a woman lawyer no longer meant being part of a tiny minority in law school, a firm, etc., women self-selected into it when previously they had opted out.
I strongly suspect the same factors are in play in STEM: women who would be good programmers self-select out of the field because they don’t want to be the 1-2 women in a class of 20 men, or the 1-2 women programmers on a team of 20 men.
> My guess is this means having 9 women on the Supreme Court is to make up for all the years there were 9 men on the Supreme Court.
I took that to mean "just as it was unremarkable in the very recent past for the SC to be 100% male, it should be unremarkable if in the future it became 100% female (on merit)".
In case of medicine - because it's a large field full of career paths that are very different from each other. The daily realities of being a pediatrician, a surgeon, a psychiatrist or a radiologist have very little in common.
There's this hypothesis that men statistically tend to pick jobs involving working with and treating patients as things, and women tend to pick jobs involving people and socializing. Medicine as a field is full of high-status jobs of both kind, so - under this hypothesis - gender parity of the overarching field is entirely unsurprising. And, as predicted, individual specializations tend to show strong gender skew.
Law is also a very large field, so I suspect the profession probably shows a similar dynamic.
Viewed through this lens, our industry is less like "medicine", and more like "radiology". And I suspect - but didn't check - that if you expand the definition of "software" to include supporting fields like design, UX and testing, the overall gender ratio will be much closer to 1:1.
Exactly. And once you look at the sub fields, medicine stops looking so gender equal. Most nurses are female. Most surgeons are male. Most family doctors are female, etc. In aggregate the field is about 50-50, but medicine specialties are not gender neutral at all.
> And I suspect - but didn't check - that if you expand the definition of "software" to include supporting fields like design, UX and testing, the overall gender ratio will be much closer to 1:1.
Could also look at careers like "developer evangelist" and "solutions engineer", both of which are technical but much more people-oriented than being a regular software engineer.
This was true when I was working as a developer evangelist at Microsoft. But Microsoft has been specifically recruiting women out of college to try to increase representation. Most of the men in my org were industry veterans while most of the women were fresh out of college. This leads to an imbalance of experience and often means the women are relegated to less technical aspects of the job which hinders their progress.
The evangelists also have to deal with not just the environment at Microsoft, but also the partners we were helping architect solutions for. On more than one occasion I know women had problems delivering solutions to a partner because that partner had blatantly sexist stakeholders who would constantly try to question or circumvent them in ways that didn't happen for men. One of the college hires I was mentoring was the point person on a project, yet every single question was sent my way and I had to keep redirecting them to the woman who was perfectly capable of answering the question and was actually in charge of the account.
So yes, there were a lot more face to face interactions, but the women still didn't stick around for these roles. Some had much better experiences actually writing code on the product teams. Some moved into project management or research.
> There's this hypothesis that men statistically tend to pick jobs involving working with and treating patients as things, and women tend to pick jobs involving people and socializing.
I think STEM just has a much lower barrier to entry than med and law. It's a lot more accessible in terms of cost and number of opportunities available, and doesn't require spending a third of your life in school.
Perhaps the biases around the home PC and video games from the 80's is still embedded today? It's my personal favorite theory: the girls were told they couldn't play in our forts 30+ years ago. This became part of modern western culture with respect to computers & gaming and became applied to computers in general.
Medicine is, in fact, absolutely brutal with misogyny and every other kind of discrimination. People just can't leave it because they are $200k deep in debt, and just have to put up with it. It can be better if you end up as an attending with autonomy, but you still have problem with hospital management etc.
Even straight white men hate medicine and can't leave because of debt... so it's not a great comparison.
Not that I'm aware - Science Technology Engineering Math is the definition of STEM I see most frequently. I'd consider Medicine to be heavily STEM adjacent, particularly in the US where most doctors get a bachelors in a STEM field before heading to med school, but not a part of it.
Googling around seems that it's contentious, and that a lot of people consider nurses, physicians etc to be STEM careers under the 'science' heading. But this doesn't seem all that core to me. (And you have to draw the line somewhere - are psychiatrists STEM? How about psychologists?)
Engineering and Math are the only two of those letters that have an actual college major with the same name..... you can't major in 'science', you major in one of the subfields of science. In fact, medicine isn't even an undergraduate major (although some universities will offer a 'pre-med' major, but not many).
Many people who go on to go to medical school will major in a STEM subject in undergrad (like biology or something)
> In fact, medicine isn't even an undergraduate major (although some universities will offer a 'pre-med' major, but not many).
This is a US-centric view - most people do in fact study medicine right out of school. It is interesting though that the definition of what constitutes a field vary quite greaty around the globe.
It was using the example of US colleges to make the point that it is too narrow a definition to say only fields that are pure science count as STEM. There are very few pure science or math fields, but I don't think you need to be 'pure' to be considered STEM.
Honestly, the definition of STEM can go in a lot of directions. CS is basically a field of engineering with a heavy slant of maths. Medicine shares a lot of characteristics with engineering, as it is very practical and result-focused, and it shares a lot of the methodology with the Sciences. I think it is quite firmly in the STEM spectrum.
But science includes biology, chemistry, pharmacy and medical research (e.g. molecular biology, neurology,...). So just because it is not the M does not say it is not part of STEM.
Actually, I am unsure how country specific this is and where to put medicine with respect to hard sciences, soft sciences, social sciences etc.
It is kind of hilarious how different this works in a lot of countries. For example in German, the translation of science is 'Wissenschaft'. It would literally translate to "the thing you do to make knowledge". Humanities are called 'Geistes'wissenschaft and Law is called 'Rechts'wissenschaft'. Math is generally considered to be part of the humanities, and CS is usually either part of the math-department or very closely settled to the engineering department.
There's many more differences between the german and anglo academic culture, let alone all the other ones out there.
> Math is generally considered to be part of the humanities
Hm, not always. In my experience it was a B.Sc., M. Sc. and Dr. rer. nat. and in the math-nat department, but it can also be associated with philosophy and of course there is no scientific method in math.
For medicine you also have the (again country specific?) question whether a medical doctorate is comparable to a hard science one, e.g. for the purpose of grants in medical research.
It depends who you ask, but typically not. STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (ie the 'M' isn't 'medicine', which is what a lot of people think).
It's obviously not a 'basic' science though and other applied sciences that are uncontroversially included in STEM get their own letter (engineering and technology).
People differ in whether they think medicine and the other applied sciences fall under the 'science' umbrella or not. Try searching around and you'll see a lot of mixed opinions on the subject.
I guess you could argue that Tech and Eng getting their own letter means they don't fit under the "S" in STEM, so STEM might not include the non-enumerated applied sciences. (Nor fields of "applied technology", like trucking.)
Right I definitely knew it was math (have 2 engineering degrees myself :) )...but still assumed it was commonly assumed to fall on the spectrum of STEM (definitely on the opposite end from say...physics...but still on the spectrum).
How can anyone get a qualifying score on the MCAT without significant exposure to science?
Disclaimer: I'm definitely coming at this from a U.S. point of view which someone mentioned in another comment effectively (not always but definitely in the overwhelming majority of cases) requires STEM undergrad degrees to get into medicine.
Some branches of medical research are basic sciences (eg endocrinology), and some are applied sciences (those broadly construed as 'health science', eg dietetics). But the practice of medicine in a clinical setting (healthcare) is both a science and an art (ie a skill learned by practicing it), and I think most would say that the knowledge it requires is scientific but much of the day-to-day work is an art.
So people tend to disagree about where to put medicine. But overall, most major public institutions in the US don't include medicine in STEM:
* NSF -- No. "The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering."
You're talking right past the comment you're replying to. "Why not medicine? Why not Law?" is straightforwardly explained by the original theory (higher status/stability), yet you're bringing them up as if they're counter examples.
This would be an amazing survey. I look forward to its publishing. I wouldn't be surprised if someone is doing it as we speak. It shouldn't be too hard or cost that much.
Though, I do have to say, your sample of one is not sufficiently convincing to me.
I don’t know how such a survey could control for projection, though. I remember reading Susan Fowler’s “blog post that was heard around the world” that ended up taking down Uber’s CEO (and nearly Uber itself) and being surprised how little of it had anything to do with being a woman - most of the frustrations she expressed were things that I’ve been frustrated by, too. It seems to me that she just experienced what every developer experienced (other than the thing about the T-shirts) and attributed all of it to her being a women, assuming that the grass must be greener on the other side.
> women in America are "organically" picking non-STEM jobs, but that is because the jobs suck, the environments suck and people are assholes at these jobs
Very general assessment without any supporting evidence.
Your sister is not sufficient evidence to make this kind of assessment. Neither is "Ask Women".
You're right about one thing "patriarchal BS".
The theory that there should be more women at some particular job sector has now reached a tipping point where it no longer makes sense because it is non-disprovable.
Really, is there any kind of evidence that can hope for that would disprove this bad idea? Or will you always try to come up with some excuses?
Preferential treatment (positive discrimination) in hard science not only makes the mistake of treating women as handicapped (they're surely not), but also makes the situation worse by skewing meritocracy.
Here is a theory, perhaps you could comment on how if fits your experience: Women are less inclined than men to choose STEM Fields, for biological reasons, that is they tend to be more interested in people than things. Because of this STEM fields are dominated by men, who, because of sheer numbers alone, end up shaping the culture to be more masculine. This makes STEM even less appealing for the relatively rare women who do have some degree of passion for STEM. If we were to accept this theory, how would we go about improving matters for society?
Robert Martin talks about how in the 60's and 70's women made up a large amount of the worlds programmers. It would seem somewhere along the way we found ways to significantly reduce the number of women entering the profession. I would argue that any biological reasons have little to no influence compared to social factors. If we accept this alternative theory, then the solution is to change the social culture around STEM to not be so exclusionary.
In the early days, programming was more of a secretarial position. The computer scientists and mathematicians who created the algorithms couldn’t be bothered to write the code and type everything up on the punchcard machines.
This sort of job for women is basically a continuation of the days when women were human computers, hired to do loads of calculations for mathematicians and scientists. The fact that women took these jobs has more to do with their limited opportunities elsewhere than anything else.
> Robert Martin talks about how in the 60's and 70's women made up a large amount of the worlds programmers. It would seem somewhere along the way we found ways to significantly reduce the number of women entering the profession. I would argue that any biological reasons have little to no influence compared to social factors. If we accept this alternative theory, then the solution is to change the social culture around STEM to not be so exclusionary.
First of all, the peak of women's representation in computing was ~35% - not all that much different from today's 20-25%. Second, even if we accept that social changes are what prompted the change in women's representation (and I would agree) it is erroneous to assume that this was due to exclusionary culture in technology. In fact, the data suggests the opposite - reductions in sexism result in reductions in the share of women in tech.
This is likely what played out in the united states. Women were displayed into computing due to sexism in other fields. Several of the women interviewed in Clive Thompson's book Coders, explained that they chose to study computer science because law firms told them explicitly that they would not let women be trial lawyers. The reduction in the share of women in computing was due to the opening of opportunities in other fields like law and medicine, which in turn meant that women who would have been displaced into computing now have the opportunity to study the field of their choice.
I am going to assume that the ~35% number that you are giving without context is the number quoted for peak female representation in earning cs degrees in the 80's. If I am wrong, please correct me. This is much later then I was thinking. I could not find numbers but everything that I have found says that at least a majority of programmers were women in before the early 70's. One of the questions I think is important is why were cs degrees so male dominated in something that was previously a female dominated field?
I am going to take your point about a reduction in sexism in other fields at face value since it seems you are more read up on that than I am. I'm not sure if this is a rebuttal to my argument though. A reduction in sexism in other fields would in fact complement an increase in sexism in computer science. I'm not sure if it is possible to distinguish the effects of each, especially if they compound on top of each other. It might be a little ironic to choose trial lawyers as an example since I don't think they have that much better of a percentage. I would also like to point out that your conclusion of "field of their choice", in my eyes, is heavily influenced by social factors.
> I am going to assume that the ~35% number that you are giving without context is the number quoted for peak female representation in earning cs degrees in the 80's. If I am wrong, please correct me. This is much later then I was thinking. I could not find numbers but everything that I have found says that at least a majority of programmers were women in before the early 70's.
Yes, these figures are from degrees earned.
I searched for sources that claim that the majority of computer programmers were women prior to the 70s. The only one I found is very poorly sources. The only one I found was from this page [1] which links to a Guardian article [2], which does not actually provide any data on the workforce composition of computing industries nor how they define what is and isn't a computing job.
> One of the questions I think is important is why were cs degrees so male dominated in something that was previously a female dominated field?
The question cannot be answered because it is based on an incorrect assertion: women never were dominant in programming or computer science - at least computer science as we understand it today.
To be more specific, in order find a time period during which computing was female dominated one has to take a very broad view of what it means to work in "computing". Women dominated computing back when "computer" was a job title [1]. Well into the 20th century, computation was mostly performed by humans and assisted with mechanical calculators [2] and slide rules. This is computing in a very raw sense, but it is not programming. The workers were not creating programs, they were executing programs. This changed during the 1960s and 70s as computers capable of storing and executing programs became cheaper and replaced human computers. To answer your question, women ceased to dominate computing when "computer" no longer referred to people and instead referred to machines and the work involved changed from personally performing computations to programming a computer to perform computations.
Personally, I don't think a human computer has very much to do with computer programming and I think it's a big stretch to try and put the two under the same banner.
> I am going to take your point about a reduction in sexism in other fields at face value since it seems you are more read up on that than I am. I'm not sure if this is a rebuttal to my argument though. A reduction in sexism in other fields would in fact complement an increase in sexism in computer science.
I'm not sure I follow. Why would a reduction in sexism in other fields have any effect on sexism in computer science?
> I'm not sure if it is possible to distinguish the effects of each, especially if they compound on top of each other. It might be a little ironic to choose trial lawyers as an example since I don't think they have that much better of a percentage. I would also like to point out that your conclusion of "field of their choice", in my eyes, is heavily influenced by social factors.
Women exceeded 40% representation in law schools in 1985, and have been at roughly parity since the 1990s. Representation of women in law is unambiguously higher than in computing, and it has been for decades. While the stories of women shared by Clive Thompson specifically wanted to become trial lawyers, their stories were representative of the field of law opening up to women more broadly. The point is, we observe a reduction of women in computing occurring at the time time that fields previously closed to women open up. The result is that women who would have been displaced into computing due to their field of choice being inaccessible now have the opportunity to study their field of choice. This would result in a reduction in women in computing even as computing remained as welcoming as it was before. This is consistent with the data presented by the original post, which observed a negative correlation between gender equality and women's representation in technology fields.
> It would seem somewhere along the way we found ways to significantly reduce the number of women entering the profession.
In absolute numbers, the number of men entering computer science just grew faster, than the number of women. Don't forget that 50 years ago, there were fewer people in CS or programming than today.
This kind of confirms a hunch I have which is that macro social beliefs change faster than corporate cultures. So a society as a whole might decide "men and women can work wherever they want" and start to teach children these values, but that doesn't mean the employees at a law or accounting firm are going to change their behaviors (not to mention their policies) at the same rate.
My father was a postal worker and described to me the process that the USPS used to improve their culture, and it involved new policies, procedures, and training for all employees.
My gf is in a community oriented job here in India. Dominated by women. Men are criticized much harshly, the environment is outright unprofessional with sex talk and gossip constantly at work. Every other day there is another girl crying because her work was criticized (fairly). Maybe try looking outside populist narratives with a more nuanced view, toxicity flows both ways.
Not, necessarily. The question could also be, why are there so many men in STEM? Because, the perceived problem, some activists try to fix is, the ratio of women vs. men in STEM. The silent assumption is often, that a ration far away from 1:1 is an indicator for blatant sexism.
I understand, but it's referencing the environment in a workplace that applies to both sexes not just women. Her complaint may have also applied to the men there, so really we should get both sides opinion shouldn't we?
That's fair. Her comments about her country of origin include "patriarchal BS at the workplace", which is gender-specific, but her complaints about the US were "the jobs suck, the environments suck and people are assholes at these jobs". The first two may (or may not) be felt more strongly by women in the same circumstances. The last one may (or may not) actually be different for women. But you'd have to ask both men and women to find out.
Gender equality means you can enter into whatever profession you choose and not be discriminated against. It's about equal rights, equal treatment, it does not mean that men and women are the same, it's not a mathematical equality.
Seems to me people are confusing conformity with social/political equality.
>It's about equal rights, equal treatment, it does not mean that men and women are the same, it's not a mathematical equality.
Sure, perhaps in theory. In practice, the kind of differences in performance and achievement that would be explained by psychological and physiological differences between men and women are immediately blamed on discrimination and the like. There is an implicit assumption that men and women are mathematically equal, which leads to the conflation of equality of opportunity with equality of outcome, exaggerating the effects of discrimination and leading to poor allocation of resources in an attempt to correct a "problem" without consideration for part of all of the actual cause.
You're not actually supporting your claims, just asking us to share your assumption that "psychological and physiological differences" makes more sense than "discrimination". Look: all you have to do is swap the two explanations and it functions just as strongly as an argument against.
> In practice, the kind of differences in performance and achievement that would be explained by [discrimination] are immediately blamed on [psychological and physiological differences between men and women]. There is an implicit assumption that men and women are [inherently different], which leads to the conflation of equality of opportunity with [disparity of outcome], exaggerating the effects of [inherent differences] and leading to poor allocation of resources in an attempt to correct a "problem" without consideration for part of all of the actual cause.
There's a wealth of information available regarding differences in men and women. The answer is all around you and affects every interaction you have with the opposite sex.
1.Brain scans showing differences in structure and/or function, used to identify transgenderism
2. Physical sexual dimorphism, which through a lifetime of social interaction can lead to different average behaviors (like growing up being stronger/weaker than 50% of the population)
3. Different concentrations of and responses to behavior altering hormones (testosterone/estrogen in particular)
4. Millions of years of evolutionary specialization through sexual dimorphism
5. Consistent differences in performance on various psychological aptitude tests (e.g. men and women have different average scores in spatial reasoning tests)
This is only a partial list, and I won't put the effort into citing any of this but it's all a Google search away, if you're willing to accept the unpopular but, IMO, glaringly obvious opinion and actually look for it. Of course there is also a well established bias in academia and the subject is sort of off limits, except in the case of transgender studies.
At the very least one shouldn't be so quick to immediately scream discrimination when there are so many alternative explanations rooted in genetics.
The opposite claim - that men and women are equal has the same problem. As far as I can tell we don't know how men and women are different other than a few physical factors related to breeding or hormones. Worse it is a controversial subject that you probably shouldn't study because when your results are other than what someone wants to believe true they will make your life difficult. Either you find a difference or you don't - either way you confirm the bias of one group and contradict the bias of the other.
I think there are real differences, other than the two I mentioned, but there is probably a lot of overlaps where you can find plenty of exceptions.
I would probably believe that if we weren't talking about software.
But software is, what, less than a century old? What possible evolutionary differences could have risen in that time frame?
I mean, the number zero is very unintuitive and the ancient Romans/greeks/chinese/whatever didn't discover it, despite the fact all evidence shows they were very smart in many things.
Yet you want me to believe that men understand that arrays are zero based better than women.
> But software is, what, less than a century old? What possible evolutionary differences could have risen in that time frame?
But guns are, what, less than a millennia old? What possible evolutionary differences could have arisen in that time frame? No way that women and men would perform differently in competitive shooting [0], right? And as it turns out, men shoot faster, women shoot more accurately.
There's all sorts of things that have only existed for a century or two where men and women perform differently. Adaptation for one task often has effects on similar tasks, after all.
This doesn't mean men are better than women at CS! But "this field didn't exist a century ago" isn't sufficient reason to assert no differences can exist.
- Women and men are equal!
- But they behave differently
- Because women are discriminated against
- How do you know that?
- Because they behave differently.
Women have unrealistic expectations sometimes. Elsewhere in this comment section someone (you?) mentioned that men are "unaccommodating" to women. But men _are_ in fact more accommodating to women nowadays than to _other men_. How do we know this? _Because men told us_! You're asking for special treatment and you don't even realize it.
> But men _are_ in fact more accommodating to women nowadays than to _other men_
This is not about generic workplace disagreements. Yes, those happen all the time.
> How do we know this? _Because men told us_!
I know that's tongue in cheek and only half serious but I'll reply anyway.
Even if 99% of men are more accommodating, that 1% would still make employment unbearable. After 10 years you probably met a few dozen assholes and just want to quit the industry because it's not worth it.
It's not "workplace disagreements". In the workplace you're generally competing against other people, including men. But that doesn't mean that men don't compete against each other. I never got a break/accommodation from anybody just because there's some mythical network of "men" in the workplace that makes things easier for men. I quite routinely see women get a break where a man would not nowadays, however. Yes, 1% of your coworkers will be assholes, but guess what, they're assholes regardless of gender of the receiver, perhaps even more so towards men because man-on-man assholeism is more socially acceptable.
To give a few examples of preferential treatment for which I have first-hand information:
- a hiring committee at Google is officially more likely to rule in favor of hiring a female in "borderline" cases; men go straight down the shitter in that case. Promo committees similarly treat women more favorably.
- at Microsoft a hiring manager can't hire a male candidate, especially, god forbid, a _white_ male candidate, unless they filled their diversity quota, without first obtaining an exception from their VP (which very few people bother to do). This is extremely frustrating to them, because MS gets FANG rejects as it is.
I suspect similar policies exist at other tech companies as well. This is special treatment already. This is "accommodation" to the fullest extent.
The frustrating thing is most of the analysis completely leaves this part out.
I would be interested to hear from women about ways they have been discriminated against, and how the industry can improve to make that less likely to happen.
But most analysis I see on line is just "Most programmers are men! That is sexist!" With no analysis going beyond that.
Which differences. There is the genitalia that nobody argues with. Likewise testosterone differences.
Pretty much everything else isn't as clear cut. We know that more men than women go into STEM - but we don't know if it is because men fundamentally like those jobs better, or if it is because our culture makes it less acceptable for women to go into STEM. Often culture things are subtle and people will say things that do not match their actions.
That's not true. We know from history that a much larger percentage of programmers in the US were women before it became a lucrative career.
> Between 30 and 50 percent of programmers were women in the 1950s, and it was seen as a natural career for them, as evidenced by a 1967 Cosmopolitan feature about “Computer Girls.” [1]
In the 1950s male culture saw computer as a boring career worth of only women. Note literally computer, sitting down with a piece of paper and calculating some figure by hand - a human spreadsheet if it were. Computer morphed into computer programmer with the advent of electronic computers, and soon afterwards men got involved.
Feminists made big advances at the same time and so it is hard to separate which factor (or something I can't think of) is important and which an irrelevant coincidence.
That’s my point. When the dominant cultural view of programming was that it was a boring career for women, women flourished as programmers. It’s strong evidence that the current overrepresentation of men is because of cultural norms, not inherent capabilities.
AFAICT men started to get involved when men started to notice that you could hit the jackpot and become a billionaire, or at least have a decent shot at becoming a millionaire.
What bullshit. Virtually all successful programmers fell in love with the machine when they were young and would program for free. And surely you noticed this.
That's not been my experience at all. That's so far outside of my experience that I sincerely wonder if you're having me on. I assume you're not, but I apologize for the subsequent wall of text if you were just joking.
I won't be so uncivil as to suggest that your perspective is "bullshit". I suppose the 'successful' qualification is sufficiently ill-defined to give a lot of wiggle room, but if I take that to mean financially successful, a minority of the programmers I know would describe themselves as lifelong machine lovers. Certainly some do, but I'd say more are the sort to get cross with you if you try to "talk shop" outside of work; they have interests and hobbies unrelated to computers and use work with computers to fund those interests and hobbies. And those that do have programming as a hobby rarely work on hobby projects that resemble the work they're paid for.
As an aside, if the industry really were filled with technophiles as you suggest, I think I'd enjoy it a lot more. As it stands, relatively few around me seem to share my interests. I've found the best way to find people who share my technophile inclinations is to look for groups and clubs that form around technical hobbies. And what I've found in doing so is that many lifelong technophiles don't work in tech at all, and of those that do work in tech, most don't get paid to work on the sort of tech they're actually passionate about.
I apologize for the incivility, it was uncalled for. By successful I mean people who are really good at programming. The overall point I was trying to make was that good programmers are drawn to the machine at young age, out of love not out of the desire to make money. So, no, I do not think men started to be drawn into the field when they " started to notice that you could hit the jackpot and become a billionaire,". There is a certain kind of mind that is drawn to tinkering with computers and typically, but not always, that mind lives in a male body.
I tend to believe it is so. However I'm honest enough to admit it is a belief that might be wrong. I'm also honest enough to admit in most cases the difference (whatever it is) isn't significant to the situation at hand.
Throwaway commenter, despite being downvoted, you're absolutely right!
I'm a woman. I AM A WOMAN IN STEM. You know what makes my blood pressure rise? People in real life and in this thread who tell me that I'm naturally not suited to it, that I like people more than things. Go away! Shut the f(*& up! I want to sit here and deal with my code and not have people tell me that I either don't know what I like or I'm not a real, normal woman. Maybe we won't get to 50-50 in some STEM fields. Who cares. People telling me for forty years that I'm a weirdo for existing with this brain in this body is not equality.
And you know what? I've got family in STEM in Scandinavia, and the horrifying discrimination stories I've heard directly about their working conditions (down to classic, "You shouldn't be here because when you get pregnant you'll stop doing science" conversations with superiors) dwarf anything I personally have experienced in STEM in the US. The homophobic comments in the sauna are direct and cruel. Scandinavian STEM is not the egalitarian paradise that Americans think it is.
> I'm a woman. I AM A WOMAN IN STEM. You know what makes my blood pressure rise? People in real life and in this thread who tell me that I'm naturally not suited to it, that I like people more than things. Go away! Shut the f(*& up! I want to sit here and deal with my code and not have people tell me that I either don't know what I like or I'm not a real, normal woman.
This is a misrepresentation of what people are writing in this thread. People are not saying that women who work in STEM are "not natural" or are working in a field they are unsuited for. They're saying that natural population-wide differences mean that the fact that women choose to enter computing at lower rates than men is not indicative of sexism. Saying that computing is 20% women because of biological differences is not making any statement of the capabilities of those women that go into computing.
> Maybe we won't get to 50-50 in some STEM fields. Who cares.
Many people do indeed subscribe to the belief that STEM should have parity between the sexes, and many companies are employing discriminatory policies to achieve this. And this doesn't just hurt men. When people witness discrimination in their companies' hiring processes, they look around and at their co-workers and wonder, "would this person have been hired if they didn't belong to a 'diverse' demographic?" Do you think this helps women?
> You know what makes my blood pressure rise? People in real life and in this thread who tell me that I'm naturally not suited to it, that I like people more than things.
Well... most men aren't suited for STEM, either.
I think that there may be some validity in saying that women, on average, have a temperament difference or focus difference or whatever that makes them want STEM less. But there is NO validity in saying to any particular individual "therefore you are not suited". No, you judge the individual by the individual, not by the group.
What I'm trying to better understand, is whether women who are not applying for programming jobs at the same rate as men, are due to lack of interest, or are they somehow being actively discouraged from the field?
I've worked with many women programmers, some of them better than me, so I know it's not the case women are inherently worse at programming than men. But I don't know the reason there are fewer women in the field.
Obviously you can't speak for all women, but maybe you have some insights as a woman that I don't as a man?
The social aspects are subtle, and more important than most of the official stuff.
In seventh grade a great (male) teacher of mine recommended a summer program for me, at the dawn of the internet (Gopher!). I joined the math & computer class and was the only girl. None of the boys would talk to me at all. At lunch every day they ditched me and I went to find some kids from the theater class to sit with. Is it malicious? No; it's seventh-grade boys. Is it encouraging? No. I was lonely six hours a day because no one would speak to me.
In my engineering college, it was the dating thing. From being a nerd who was ignored in high school, not exactly prime dating material, I was suddenly transformed into a 'female'. I got asked out constantly. Sounds great, right? But if your classmates only want to have sex with you, and don't want to do homework with you, you're cut off from much of the joy of intellectual discovery of college. I was ignored by the profs and couldn't do a senior project, even though it was in the catalogue, because no prof would sponsor me. When I waitressed, the guys would first flirt with me and then upon discovering I was an undergrad in a tough major they'd turn very serious and gush about how important it was for women to be involved in that field, how special I was. Is it evil? No. It's like being a stay-at-home dad at the park with your kids in the middle of the day. Alienating. (My husband reports he hasn't made it past the none-of-the-moms-talking-to-him phase when he's made his forays.)
From college into grad school the emphasis on me as a potential romantic partner didn't stop. I remember joining the Linux Users Group in the town I went to grad school in. Some great guys, some good parties & good times. All juxtaposed with, for instance, the guy who I thought invited me over to talk about compilers... but when I showed up, candles were lit and the dinner table set for two. Is that evil? Is that an active discouragement from the field? It's just deflating. I thought I'd found someone I could talk to. He didn't want to talk to me after I'd declined to get involved.
I wore baggier and baggier clothes and never figured out how to do makeup or hair (now holding me back in corporate America) but simply trying to disappear into sweatshirts did not enable me to be 'one of the guys'.
In one research center I was involved with in grad school, it was more textbook-style discrimination. The women did all the work and wrote the grants that got the money. How can I say that? Surely it's unfair! But it is true, because everyone in the research group besides the director and one guy was female -- there was literally no one else. The director was phasing into retirement and was trying to groom the guy employee -- taking him to golf on Saturdays, taking guy to drink South African wine with director and director's wife. The problem was that guy employee wasn't very good, and once director retired, guy couldn't do the work and wasn't able to keep that position or the next two. The women found varied levels of success and failure elsewhere, but didn't get the chance at leadership at that center!
Later in grad school and into my postdocs, it was the constant assumption that I was primarily interested in education, not research. Put into a job code where I actually couldn't get funding from the research grants I won, asked last year to contribute to the education components of three guys' research grants to boost their 'broader impacts' score. Not everyone did this -- one colleague actually talked with me about research, and it was really nice.
When I was a prof, one or two (male) students tried to physically intimidate me into giving a higher grade. That's 1, 2 out of thousands... but an experience that my male colleagues did not have. I taught a lot of extra independent studies because people felt 'comfortable' with me; my super-friendly and wonderful and cuddly male colleague didn't experience that. I had to serve on the diversity committee and run a diversity event: I did not want to, but it was strongly implied that my promotion was linked to this service. (Right: I'd forgotten I was 'voluntold' for this by a senior male colleague who then didn't mention my name in the acknowledgements and took all the credit at the opening, because he's a "champion for diversity".) Students also came to me with personal concerns a lot, like roommate problems, family being evicted, needing to schedule an abortion, money trouble. I asked my male colleagues what they did about this and they said they'd never been asked about any of these things! Were these kids in college actively discouraging me from a STEM career? No way in hell! They were lovely young people! But the extra burden of teaching additional independent studies, running this stupid diversity event, and providing tissues to students in real trouble took time away from writing up research, and that's how you get promoted.
I couldn't win the battle with being tracked more and more into education rather than the research I love and left academia for industry this year. Hooray! Now I'm paid more and I 'program all day', and get to do the experimental CS/math/stats I enjoy. Am I a success story or not? I'm the example of the 'leaky pipeline' in academia.
Several replies to my previous comment said things like 'literally no one has said that' there's a conflict between me being female and liking STEM. But from this thread alone:
"I'm my experience women tend to be more interested in human facing parts of software like web and ui development, but less interested in the back end parts." "What if women were calling those environments toxic because they had a hard time doing well in there?" "I don't understand why modern society doesn't understand/want to believe that men and women have different career interests than men. Men and women value things differently, and it's not all because of society." "Ask women and you'll find that most aren't interested in programming a computer all day. Which one could argue is a sane choice. If anything it's more sane. Stop trying to make them feel like something is wrong if they don't have this inclination. Males and females have different preferences on average, some as early as birth[1]." Are any of these commenters actively discouraging me from pursuing my STEM career? No. They're just repeating the message again and again and again that women just like different things. Yeah, I do like different things. But it's always code for "you're not normal". And it's true that I'm statistically not in the majority. Folks, I know that. You don't have to tell me every day. I've been able to calculate percentages for thirty years. I've known I'm outnumbered for thirty years. I'm always aware that I'm a minority. Always. And that's what is tiring. It's not discouraging -- it's the surprise that I exist, then either the turning to talk to someone else or the gush of fake or real 'encouragement' that I'm so brave to be so different.
As a man in tech, I honestly have no idea what the women around me experience, so it’s valuable for me to get some perspective.
It’s interesting to me how you don’t blame any one specific person for actively trying to discourage you, just the constant exhaustion from being treated differently from those around you.
So one take away, is by recruiting more girls and women into coding, the girls and women who do want to pursue it won’t feel so out of place. So it is difficult to determine the “true” number of female people who like programming, until we have a critical mass of women programmers.
>People in real life and in this thread who tell me that I'm naturally not suited to it, that I like people more than things
Not a single person in this thread has said anything like that. Perhaps your perception is skewed. I know the consensus is different in certain pockets of our society, and especially online, but being [female|minority race|LGBT] does not automatically make your interpretation of your experiences valid.
Kind of like the humorous rule of thumb: if everyone around you is an asshole, maybe you're the asshole.
> - Because differences are observed at birth, are relatively consistent across countries with vastly different cultures, and the differences in behavior are observed even when raising children in a controlled environment free of gendered roles.
This is in reference to gender differences like extraversion, and make newborns dedicating more attention to things and female newborns dedicating more attention to people.
As far as this post's article, the rates are not vastly different results, most of the countries that observed fall within a range of 30%. If this were socially determined, we'd expect some countries to have 80-90% women in technology. That is not the case, all countries have majority male tech workforces, and they're mostly in the 15-35% range with some outliers on both ends.
Furthermore, what differences that are observed contradict the idea that rigid gender roles cause lower rates of women in tech. Countries with some of the strictest gender roles like south Korea and Algeria see the highest rates of women in tech.
Whether or not a range of 30% is "huge" is a subjective judgement, but that's besides the point. The point is, there are zero observed instances of women forming the majority of a the technology workforce in any county.
I'm not sure if it's even possible to put countries in a binary between patriarchy and matriarchy. Instead, the study presented put countries on a scale that measures overall gender equality. And what difference we do observe is that patriarchal countries have higher rates of women in tech, but still lower than parity. Countries with gender equality (is this what you mean by "matriarchy"?) have low rates of women in tech often in the 20-10% range. So in "patriarchies" we see more female representation, but still lower than the majority and in egalitarian countries we see
> The nerd/geek being an awkward boy with glasses troppe is specifically a western concept for example.
And yet, the disparity between women and men in technology exists outside of western countries. Thus, attributing the disparity between men and women in tech to tropes like these is not effective line of reasoning. This is exactly the point that I'm making: attributing the gender distribution in tech to social factors is difficult when said distribution is observed across a wide variety of societies.
> Women in Eastern Europe worked in factories side by side with men for generations.
This was the same case in Western Europe and Asia as well - I'm not sure why you chose to highlight this fact.
> Gender roles does not equal your concept of gender roles like women not liking/belonging/choosing not to be in tech.
I'm not sure what you're writing about here, this sentence does not make sense to me. The point is that highly unequal societies with strict gender roles see more women in technology than more egalitarian societies.
And for what it's worth, while 20% representation in tech in the united states might seem low at first glance it's actually not at all uncommon to have fields that are >95% one gender or another. Tech is on par with "Health practitioner, support technologists, and technicians", "Loan interviewers and clerks", "Printing press operators", and a couple percent above "Couriers and messengers" as far as gender disparities go [1].
> Countries with gender equality (is this what you mean by "matriarchy"?)
No... I mean the dictionary definition.
Where men didn't have the right to vote, work or own property until recently, where women are expected to own and make all the money, where men are raised to be married away, where men are expected to make the coffee and women to run the meeting. So on and so forth.
I'm afraid that entire paragraph does not address my comment because you misunderstood what matriarchy means.
> And yet, the disparity between women and men in technology exists outside of western countries
Not if you take into consideration the labour participation rate... If you do, the disparity basically disappears.
These societies with rigid gender rules tend to have less women overall working at all.
> This was the same case in Western Europe and Asia as well - I'm not sure why you chose to highlight this fact.
But they were forced to do that until the 90s under communism, I'm not talking about peasants in the middle ages.
I mention Eastern Europe because I'm trying to give you alternative explanations for women participation in STEM.
Eastern Europe and India have similar rates of participation but are vastly different societies.
What do they have in common? They are not the West.
They don't have the West's cultural norms. Ergo, one of those norms is stopping women from going into STEM.
That, to me, sounds more likely. Much easier to explain vs trying to find something in common between India and Eastern Europe, which is pretty crazy.
> I'm not sure what you're writing about here, this sentence does not make sense to me. The point is that highly unequal societies with strict gender roles see more women in technology than more egalitarian societies.
And my point is your cultural expectation do not translate to other cultures.
There might be a specific gender inequality that stops women from entering STEM. That may or may not exist in a society, independent on what gender inequality is overall.
Vastly different societies like India and Eastern Europe have similar participation rates, despite the fact that Eastern Europe is much wealthier.
If what you said is true, you'd expect Eastern Europe to have lower participation rate than India, but that's not the case.
Correlation broken.
> not at all uncommon to have fields that are >95% one gender or another
That just means the problem is beyond just STEM, not an explanation.
> No... I mean the dictionary definition. Where men didn't have the right to vote, work or own property until recently, where women are expected to own and make all the money, where men are raised to be married away, where men are expected to make the coffee and women to run the meeting. So on and so forth. I'm afraid that entire paragraph does not address my comment because you misunderstood what matriarchy means.
We would expect to see even lower rates of women in STEM. The data shows an inverse relationship between women gaining more rights and resources and women's representation in STEM.
> Not if you take into consideration the labour participation rate... If you do, the disparity basically disappears. These societies with rigid gender rules tend to have less women overall working at all.
Yes, they do. Differences in labor force participation do not hold up to scrutiny. Plenty of the countries with less women's equality also have high labor force participation [1].
> But they were forced to do that until the 90s under communism, I'm not talking about peasants in the middle ages. I mention Eastern Europe because I'm trying to give you alternative explanations for women participation in STEM. Eastern Europe and India have similar rates of participation but are vastly different societies. What do they have in common? They are not the West. They don't have the West's cultural norms. Ergo, one of those norms is stopping women from going into STEM. That, to me, sounds more likely. Much easier to explain vs trying to find something in common between India and Eastern Europe, which is pretty crazy.
But India and Eastern Europe still see low rates of women in technology. In fact, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic see the same or lower rates of women in technology than in the United States.
You're pointing out these differences, and these differences do not yield higher rates of women in technology. So why do you seem to think that these differences are significantly affecting rates of women in technology.
> And my point is your cultural expectation do not translate to other cultures. There might be a specific gender inequality that stops women from entering STEM. That may or may not exist in a society, independent on what gender inequality is overall. Vastly different societies like India and Eastern Europe have similar participation rates, despite the fact that Eastern Europe is much wealthier. If what you said is true, you'd expect Eastern Europe to have lower participation rate than India, but that's not the case. Correlation broken.
Eastern Europe does have lower rates of women in technology than India. India has ~30% women in STEM [2]. Whereas the Eastern European countries have representation mostly in the range of 20-25%.
> That just means the problem is beyond just STEM, not an explanation.
Correct. The "problem" is that men and women have difference interests, and this difference is largely universal across different societies.
Does social influence have some effect? Probably. We observe that countries with less rights and opportunities for women do have higher rates of women in technology than more egalitarian countries. But this influence only shifts the representation of women in tech by 10-15%.
> We would expect to see even lower rates of women in STEM. The data shows an inverse relationship between women gaining more rights and resources and women's representation in STEM
That's just disingenuous, we literally don't have that data to make any claims on it. You're the one which said you'd expect women participation rates to be randomised, as in some countries to have more women in STEM than men. I simply counterpointed with the fact that societies aren't randomised, they are all patriarchal on some level, that's why you never see more women in tech in any country.
> In fact, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic see the same or lower rates of women in technology than in the United States.
Oh, so your correlation that stricter gender roles and women getting into STEM is not true? Did you just prove yourself wrong?!
Also, Romania, Bulgaria and Russia have higher participation rates than the US...
It's almost like your alleged correlation is BS and random, even within similar countries and cultures.
> The "problem" is that men and women have difference interests, and this difference is largely universal across different societies.
You're literally reading an article claiming the opposite (with sources) mate. Did you read it?!
> But this influence only shifts the representation of women in tech by 10-15%.
That's like gigantic. It's almost parity in the workplace. How can you dismiss it?!
The small difference is explained by the difference in labour participation rates.
We already talked about this but it's like you didn't read my comment.
> That's just disingenuous, we literally don't have that data to make any claims on it. You're the one which said you'd expect women participation rates to be randomised, as in some countries to have more women in STEM than men. I simply counterpointed with the fact that societies aren't randomised, they are all patriarchal on some level, that's why you never see more women in tech in any country.
The core thesis of the article posted is that societies that are more egalitarian - closer to "matriarchy" - on average have less female representation in tech. The more countries drift away from "patriarchy" and towards "matriarchy" the fewer women go into tech.
> Oh, so your correlation that stricter gender roles and women getting into STEM is not true? Did you just prove yourself wrong?!
Many of these countries are more egalitarian than the US as per the data in the original post. Perhaps you should not have assumed that all Eastern European countries are less egalitarian than the US.
> Also, Romania, Bulgaria and Russia have higher participation rates than the US... It's almost like your alleged correlation is BS and random, even within similar countries and cultures.
The correlation is between gender equality and women's representation in tech. Yes, the rates of women in tech in Eastern European countries varies because different Eastern European countries have different levels of gender equality.
You're the one who erroneously claimed that "Eastern Europe and India have similar rates of participation but are vastly different societies" when in fact Eastern European countries have a variety of rates of women in tech, many of which are lower than the United States' 25% let alone India's 30%. I agree, the alleged correlation between Eastern Europe and rates of female representation in tech is BS and random - but that was your alleged correlation...
But what doesn't vary? The fact that these rates are overwhelmingly in a relatively narrow band between 20-35%.
> You're literally reading an article claiming the opposite (with sources) mate. Did you read it?!
If this is your takeaway from the article, I would suggest re-reading it. There is some variation across societies - but not much. The overwhelming majority of countries studied had female representation in tech between 15-30%. This is indeed a fairly consistent rate.
The slight variation that does exist demonstrates an inverse correlation between women gaining more rights and authority and female representation in tech.
> That's like gigantic. It's almost parity in the workplace. How can you dismiss it?!
It is nowhere near parity in the workplace. The countries with the greatest gender equality like Finland and Norway have 20% female representation in tech. Countries on the other end of the spectrum like Turkey and Indonesia have 35%. This is still barely over 1/3rd.
> The small difference is explained by the difference in labour participation rates.
> We already talked about this but it's like you didn't read my comment.
I did read your comment, and provided data that demonstrated that differences in labor participation does not hold true. This is factually incorrect. These countries with less gender equality have female labor participation rates that are often the same or higher than the US and other western countries. For example, Indonesia has a female labor participation rate of 52% as compared to the United States' 56%. Vietnam has a female labor participation rate of 76%. It we adjusted its female representation in tech to account for differences in labor participation, the percent of women in tech would go down.
Adjusting for this does not explain the difference in representation in tech. Furthermore, even if it were you are erroneously assuming that if more women entered the workforce those women would.
> You're supposed to compare between women and men in the same country. Women's labour participation rate in the US has less than nothing to do with Vietnam.
> The more countries drift away from "patriarchy" and towards "matriarchy" the fewer women go into tech.
We literally don't have matriarchies, there's no data about it. And I also don't know why you put that in quotes, it's an actual word.
> Many of these countries are more egalitarian than the US as per the data in the original post. Perhaps you should not have assumed that all Eastern European countries are less egalitarian than the US.
Of really? Which ones? Because Hungary certainly isn't.
You just proved yourself wrong and you're not addressing what the core of the argument of what I said.
> The fact that these rates are overwhelmingly in a relatively narrow band between 20-35%.
> The overwhelming majority of countries studied had female representation in tech between 15-30%. This is indeed a fairly consistent rate.
I'm ignoring the fact that you can't even keep your numbers straight within the same comment...
It's not consistent at all, it's almost the entire range!
And given that close to 0% or 50% is unlikely to happen in any country, that's pretty much where you expect the probability distribution to land anyway. It says nothing.
It's like saying unemployment falls between 5-40% in the majority of countries. Well d'oh, it's expected. It says nothing about the health of the countries in questiom.
> I agree, the alleged correlation between Eastern Europe and rates of female representation in tech is BS and random - but that was your alleged correlation...
Wait, what exactly is your allegation then, if not that?
> Countries on the other end of the spectrum like Turkey and Indonesia have 35%. This is still barely over 1/3rd.
You're still not addressing the labour participation rates between women and men. You don't get it.
> For example, Indonesia has a female labor participation rate of 52% as compared to the United States' 56%. Vietnam has a female labor participation rate of 76%.
You're suppressed to compare bergen women and men in the same country. Women's labour participation rate has less than nothing to do with Vietnam.
You don't get it.
> Adjusting for this does not explain the difference in representation in tech.
Yes it would, you just don't know how to adjust for it.
> Furthermore, even if it were you are erroneously assuming that if more women entered the workforce those women would.
It doesn't matter if they would or not, it won't affect the statistics, you still need to adjust for it.
> We literally don't have matriarchies, there's no data about it. And I also don't know why you put that in quotes, it's an actual word.
We may or may not have matriarchies - a couple countries like Spain do have more women in parliament than men so maybe they fit your definition of a matriarchy. But we do have data on how the female representation in tech varies with respect to increases in women's rights and resources, and the data shows that the more rights and resources women have the less they go into technology. This would indicate that a matriarchy would have among the lowest rates of women in technology.
> Of really? Which ones? Because Hungary certainly isn't. You just proved yourself wrong and you're not addressing what the core of the argument of what I said.
I did indeed address this. In this comment [1] You had claimed that Eastern Europe has similar shares of women in STEM fields as India, and that this is due to cultural factors. I pointed out that Eastern Europe does not, in fact, have similar rates of women in tech as India - only Bulgaria, Romania and Georgia do. Eastern European countries with lower rates of women in tech as compared to India include: Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Moldova, Poland, Slovakia, and Croatia (if you consider it Eastern European).
Furthermore, your comment rested on the assumption that gender roles in Eastern European countries are monolithic. This is not the case. Hungary, as you pointed out has very low gender equality as does Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Slovenia, on the other hand, is the 5th highest on this list. Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Moldova, and Lithuania have the same or higher ratings for gender equality as the United States.
So to recap:
1. Eastern Europe does not similar rates of women in tech than India's 30%, most have lower rates of women in tech than the United States' 25%.
2. Eastern European countries are diverse and have varied degrees of gender equality, they are not a monolith so talking about gender roles in "eastern europe" rests on the false understanding that these countries have the same culture with respect to gender.
I pointed out that your argument with respect to Eastern Europe is contradicted by the data we have, and is based on the false notion that women in Eastern Europe have a similar experience with respect to gender equality. This seems like this thoroughly addresses your point, care to explain what you feel is missing?
> I'm ignoring the fact that you can't even keep your numbers straight within the same comment. It's not consistent at all, it's almost the entire range!
Can you please read the article before posting comments like this? Every country including outliers falls between 15% (Chile) and 41% (Algeria). That's 36%. That's barely over half of the range, let alone "almost the entire range".
> And given that close to 0% or 50% is unlikely to happen in any country, that's pretty much where you expect the probability distribution to land anyway. It says nothing.
Why? Why wouldn't we expect countries to be 60% women in tech, or 70%, or 80% women in technology? Why do you take it for granted that there won't be any countries with majority women in technology?
> Wait, what exactly is your allegation then, if not that?
You're the one that originally brought up Eastern Europe and India. You falsely claimed that Eastern Europe has similar rates of women in tech as India, and I pointed out that this is factually incorrect - most Eastern European countries have lower rates of women in technology than India.
> You're still not addressing the labour participation rates between women and men. You don't get it. You're suppressed to compare bergen women and men in the same country. Women's labour participation rate has less than nothing to do with Vietnam. You don't get it.
What do you mean by adjusting for women's labor participation rate. You say that I'm not doing this correctly, but you neglect to explain what you mean by this. If a country that has 100% female labor participation had 30% women in technology, and another country has 50% labor participation and 15% women in tech then the latter's rate of women in tech is actually the same if you account for labor participation rates.
If you insist that the better way is to compare the ratio of men to women in the labor force, here's that data [2]. It does not significantly alter the results. The United States has a ratio of 0.82 female to male. Norway has 0.885 - so its share of women in tech would actually go down even further if we adjust it to match the US. Viet Nam has 0.889.
There are some that do have significantly different participation rates. Chile has 0.657, so its share of women in tech would rise by ~20% from 15% to 18% if we made its labor participation ratio the same as the US. Qatar has 0.531 so its ~23% women in tech would rise to 35%. But notice that these adjustments move these countries closer towards the trend line. In other words, adjusting for the differences in labor participation rates makes the inverse relationship between gender equality and women's participation in STEM even stronger.
> Furthermore, your comment rested on the assumption that gender roles in Eastern European countries are monolithic.
Neither is India but I feel this is splitting hairs.
> I pointed out that your argument with respect to Eastern Europe is contradicted by the data we have, and is based on the false notion that women in Eastern Europe have a similar experience with respect to gender equality.
Ok... but that's true in India, the US... they are all varied cultures. You're just pointing holes in you argument really.
I always said women equality and women participation in STEM is pretty random.
Once again, you're really arguing against yourself. There is no correlation between women in STEM and women's rights.
> Why? Why wouldn't we expect countries to be 60% women in tech, or 70%, or 80% women in technology? Why do you take it for granted that there won't be any countries with majority women in technology?
Again. Because we don't have matriarchies. You really don't seem to grasp the concept. Please take a minute to think about it.
> You're the one that originally brought up Eastern Europe and India. You falsely claimed that Eastern Europe has similar rates of women in tech as India, and I pointed out that this is factually incorrect - most Eastern European countries have lower rates of women in technology than India.
Oh ok, I should clarify then. Some countries in Eastern Europe have similar rates as India. It does not change my argument one bit, except you win some semantic nonsense.
I can rephrase my argument from before with "some Eastern European countries" instead. Will that change your mind?
> What do you mean by adjusting for women's labor participation rate. You say that I'm not doing this correctly, but you neglect to explain what you mean by this. If a country that has 100% female labor participation had 30% women in technology, and another country has 50% labor participation and 15% women in tech then the latter's rate of women in tech is actually the same if you account for labor participation rates.
Than why are you comparing these countries with the US's women participation rate in the workforce?! What does the US have to do with this?
> The United States has a ratio of 0.82 female to male. Norway has 0.885 - so its share of women in tech would actually go down even further if we adjust it to match the US.
> Chile has 0.657, so its share of women in tech would rise by ~20% from 15% to 18% if we made its labor participation ratio the same as the US.
Can you stop comparing things to the US? What's wrong with you? You're supposed to compare with men's labour participation rates, in the same country.
I already told you this.
0.657 means only 65 of women work for every 100 men.
How are you not getting this?
Qatar has 0.531 so its ~23% women in tech would rise to 35%. But notice that these adjustments move these countries closer towards the trend line. In other words, adjusting for the differences in labor participation rates makes the inverse relationship between gender equality and women's participation in STEM even stronger.
This hinges on how you define a matriarchy. Spain, as I pointed out earlier, has a majority female national leadership. If it isn't a matriarchy, one could still argue that's closer to a matriarchy than a patriarchy.
You insist that we don't have any matriarchies, yet my request for you to explain how you're choosing to define matriarchy remains unfulfilled.
> Ok... but that's true in India, the US... they are all varied cultures. You're just pointing holes in you argument really. I always said women equality and women participation in STEM is pretty random. Once again, you're really arguing against yourself. There is no correlation between women in STEM and women's rights.
> Again. Because we don't have matriarchies. You really don't seem to grasp the concept. Please take a minute to think about it.
And why would we think that a matriarchy would have over 50% women in technology? As countries move away from patriarchy and towards gender equality the percentage of tech worker that are women go down. Why would one conclude from this that a matriarchy would see a majority of women in technology?
> Oh ok, I should clarify then. Some countries in Eastern Europe have similar rates as India. It does not change my argument one bit, except you win some semantic nonsense. I can rephrase my argument from before with "some Eastern European countries" instead. Will that change your mind?
Sure, some Eastern European countries have similar rates as India. And most do not.
> Than why are you comparing these countries with the US's women participation rate in the workforce?! What does the US have to do with this?
You adjust for labor participation by selecting a baseline, and adjusting the other countries to match this baseline. Sure, I could have used any country for the baseline.
> Can you stop comparing things to the US? What's wrong with you? You're supposed to compare with men's labour participation rates, in the same country. I already told you this.
I am very confused as to what you're saying here. I am comparing women's labor participation rates with men's labor participation rates, in the same country. When I say that Chile has a female/male labor participation ratio of 0.657 it means 66 women work for every 100 men. By comparison the US has 82 women in the workforce for every 100 men.
So if Chile has 15% women in tech, and we want to know what this percentage would be if its female/male labor participation ratio was the same as the US we adjust for that: 15% * (.82 / .657) = 18.2%.
Why do you think that I'm not comparing women's labor participation rates with men? You do realize that the ratio of female to male labor participation is, fundamentally, comparing women and men's labor participation rates?
> 0.657 means only 65 of women work for every 100 men. How are you not getting this?
Dictionary definition. There's no opinion about it.
> Spain, as I pointed out earlier, has a majority female national leadership.
Not what defined a matriarchy.
> If it isn't a matriarchy, one could still argue that's closer to a matriarchy than a patriarchy.
Not how it works. It's a gradient, yes. Spain being a matriarchy? No.
> You insist that we don't have any matriarchies, yet my request for you to explain how you're choosing to define matriarchy remains unfulfilled.
I gave several examples...
Like, have any modern countries denied men to vote before women? No.
> And why would we think that a matriarchy would have over 50% women in technology?
You. You f-ing asked that. You expected some countries to have over 50% representation, which is stupid since every country is patriarchal on some level.
We don't have matriarchies. I can't stress this enough.
You can't make claims on what we can't observe.
> As countries move away from patriarchy and towards gender equality the percentage of tech worker that are women go down.
You yourself told me of several countries where that's not true. How are you not getting this?!
> Why would one conclude from this that a matriarchy would see a majority of women in technology?
I don't, matriarchies don't exist.
> Sure, some Eastern European countries have similar rates as India. And most do not.
Population wise, they do.
>> Than why are you comparing these countries with the US's women participation rate in the workforce?! What does the US have to do with this?
> You adjust for labor participation by selecting a baseline, and adjusting the other countries to match this baseline. Sure, I could have used any country for the baseline.
No... My point was about how many women were in that country's workforce... Do you not get maths?
> I am very confused as to what you're saying here.
Yes, you clearly are.
> By comparison the US has 82 women in the workforce for every 100 men.
Nobody cares. It does not matter.
> Why do you think that I'm not comparing women's labor participation rates with men?
Because you're not? You keep bringing up the US for some reason.
> You do realize that the ratio of female to male labor participation is, fundamentally, comparing women and men's labor participation rates?
Yeah, I told you that. Yet, still, you bring up the US. Why, ffs, why?
> 0.657 means only 65 of women work for every 100 men. How are you not getting this?
> Dictionary definition. There's no opinion about it.
There are a variety of dictionaries with different definitions. Some of them define it as a country where the majority of political rulers are women. As explained above, some countries can fit that definition.
> You. You f-ing asked that. You expected some countries to have over 50% representation, which is stupid since every country is patriarchal on some level. We don't have matriarchies. I can't stress this enough. You can't make claims on what we can't observe.
In a previous comment I wrote, "Why wouldn't we expect countries to be 60% women in tech, or 70%, or 80% women in technology? Why do you take it for granted that there won't be any countries with majority women in technology?" To which you responded, "Again. Because we don't have matriarchies. You really don't seem to grasp the concept. Please take a minute to think about it."
I asked why we wouldn't expect some countries to have majority women in tech and your response was that this was because there are no matriarchies. This definitely seems to indicate that you believe matriarchies would have majority women in tech. If not, then this response doesn't make sense.
If one does not suspect that matriarchies would have majority women in tech, then what does the absence of matriarchies justify your claim that it's unreasonable to expect any country to have over 50% women in technology?
I agree that such an expectation is unreasonable - but not because of the absence of any matriarchies. Quite the opposite, when look at the women's representation in technology patriarchal societies that are repressive towards women have the highest representation of women in tech and egalitarian countries have the least. The world, overall, is trending towards gender equality (though some regions are progressing considerably slower than others).
> > As countries move away from patriarchy and towards gender equality the percentage of tech worker that are women go down.
> You yourself told me of several countries where that's not true. How are you not getting this?!
I have re-read my comments and have not found any instance where I wrote such a thing. I believe I have been consistent in my two core claims: 1) The overall distribution of women's representation in technology is fairly narrow, occupying a total range of 15-41% and with 20-30% accounting for the majority of countries. 20-35% accounts for effectively all save for some outliers on either end. 2) What variation does exist shows that women's representation in technology is inversely associated with gender equality. The more equal countries are, the lower the representation of women in technology on average.
Your rest of your comments about my failure to compare men's labor participation and women's labor participation seem to reveal fundamental misunderstandings of what a ratio is.
A female/male ratio of X means that for every man there are X women in the workforce. So when I say that the US has a female to male labor participation ratio of 0.82 it means that there are .82 women in the workforce for every man. Or 82 women for every 100 men. Comparing ratios is comparing the women's labor participation rates to men's labor participation rates. Let me use a an example to put this in practice:
If one country has a female/male labor participation ratio of 0.75 and has 30% tech workers that are women, and another country has a female/male labor participation ratio of 0.5 and 20% of its tech workers are women then one could argue that these countries actually have the same rate of women going into tech. Although women's share in the latter is smaller, the labor participation rate is lower. If we used the former as the baseline, and adjusted the latter's female/male labor participation ratio to match it then the latter country would see it's representation of women in tech go up by 50%, rising from 20% to 30%.
You seem to be fixated on the choice of the US as the baseline. But the choice of baseline does not matter. I could have gone about it in the opposite direction in the above example. I could have taken the first country with a female/male labor participation ratio of 0.75 and adjusted it down to have a female/male labor ratio of 0.5 and its female representation in tech would have dropped to 20%. The conclusion is the same: when adjusted for female/male labor participation the two countries have identical rates of women in tech. So the fact that you're pointing towards choice of the US as the baseline and erroneously saying that I'm not comparing men's and women's labor participation rates reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how this normalization works.
I am indeed comparing the men and women's labor participation rates. To say otherwise is factually incorrect.
That's now what Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity initiatives at companies, universities, and governments are aiming for though. It's quotas for everyone and anything other than 50% females and 50% or more of "minorities" [in quotations since this is the vaguest term ever] means there is rampant racism and sexism in this toxic patriarchy.
For classical liberals, that means being free from the constraint imposed by other individuals.
Today the definition of "restraints" is being expanded beyond the artificial to the point where everything is being declared a "human right" without any consideration for the fact that some of those things can only be provided by taking from someone else (resources and/or labor). Basically, more and more people feel that people should be free from natural restraints like the responsibility of having to provide for oneself (or at least trying to). But the rub is that the only way to free some people from those natural restraints is bondage of others to provide for them.
An artificial constraint is one that exists outside of your personal capability.
If you are capable of solving the toughest scientific or technical challenges, but you are prevented from doing so because of some attribute of your circumstance (your color, your gender, your age, your wealth level, your current job title, etc.), then you are being artificially restrained.
If you can solve the toughest challenge, but you choose not to because you would rather throw clay on a pottery wheel, then you are also free from constraints. (There are plenty of people that are practically forced into careers because they are technically capable, and because their elders believe that if one can, one should.)
Under this definition, how would you classify geography? Many people could contribute to America's top level countries but are not able to because of immigration policies.
Human made geographical boundaries (borders) are usually artificial, and they certainly can impact freedom of people on both sides. Unfortunately, solving immigration and creating "one world" is exceedingly difficult or even impossible - especially when most countries (including the US) still have enough corruption that they are internally broken without even considering pressure from immigration.
The most important thing that matters is ability to earn a decent living. Decent living is essentially ability to afford most things like a property in good neighborhoods, personal identity (clothes), transportation, quality education for children, and safety.
People are really smart and they optimise for their own survival. Essentially - decent wage -> better options for partner -> better standard of living.
In some countries, like Norway, a teacher makes a decent wage. Not as much as a software engineer, but good enough to support a pretty good lifestyle.
Where in some countries, like India, a stem graduate makes a LOT more money than a teacher. I made more money in my third year as a software engineer, than my father who worked in public sector as a civil engineer with 25+ years of experience. Comparison with non technical workers with stem fields is really lop sided when it comes to earning potential. Plus if you are possibly the first generation which can break out of poverty cycle for your entire family, then that adds another layer of pressure to choose certain fields. Hence men or women tend to choose these fields.
As wealth creation in some of these countries reaches to a point where non stem fields receive similar earning potential, already happening in India, we will see lower number of women opting for these fields as well.
We would really like to find a non economic reason for some of these disparities, like patriarchy, gender discrimination and so on, but it is probably mostly economic.
It absolutely does. I know many men in India who would rather do something else than do engineering. Look at the background of most standup comedians in India for example. Most of them come from engineering/stem background and use that to fulfill their side hustle to be a comic and then become full time comics if successful. I was personally far more interested in studying classic Sanskrit literature, but was talked into becoming an engineer.
I come from a very progressive family that always tried to treat me and my sister equally. Still, I think there was a much larger social pressure on me to be financially successful than my sister. And that is in a very progressive country, too, in more conservative countries the effect is probably larger still.
I do not know how to calculate that. At least few stem fields have very high number of women, medicine for example. So why more women do not choose mechanical engineering, hard to say. It is not because these fields are dominated by men. Women were not dominating medicine, but now they do. So clearly women are not afraid of taking up fields which are male dominated. Women are far more courageous than that. Women also dominate HR departments of many financial, software, and other industries. So clearly they work in the same industry as men do, just in different roles. So why they do not choose to be engineers in these companies instead of HR person, I have no idea. All I am contesting it, it is not because men have an invisible alliance to stop women from doing so.
Not just society, but women especially. It’s not even an issue of socialization. Unemployed or underemployed men are heavily penalized in the dating pool. You don’t have to be a gold digger to value a stable provider as a partner. And women who are self-sufficient still generally tend to prefer men who are at least roughly equal in their ability to provide.
Because men have more options for careers that provide an upper middle income lifestyle in India than women. Tech is one of the few that women have access to that can provide that.
Could be a lot of reasons.... if STEM majors have a 'bro' culture, then more men would feel comfortable in that culture than women, and would not be driven away from it.
The hypothesis is that when economics are less of a factor, people tend towards work they find more enjoyable. Men control most of STEM, so it sucks less for them, which is why you see women disproportionately leaving.
Also just to add - In countries like India, it is incredibly difficult to defer which major to choose. You basically have to choose a major as soon as you have graduated high school and it is quite painful and costly(time+money) to change it afterwords. Which is why we see far higher percentage of engineers go get a MBA in India, as most do not want to be engineers in the first place.
> We would really like to find a non economic reason for some of these disparities
I don't even know if we like to find a non-economic reason or if most people simply don't know economics well enough to reason through 2nd and 3rd order economic consequences. Since they can't reason through it they choose simple explanations despite it being wrong. This is the same reason why people used to believe that deities controlled things like the weather and their fortune in life.
The "patriarchy" gets basically the same faith-based treatment as Zeus/Jupiter.
It is quite difficult to reason with people who would rather blame an invisible force. For example - most women did not work in factories until much later or even today. More Americans died in making stuff for the WW1 than in the actual war, as the conditions of factory work was brutal. Why would anyone want to subject themselves to that environment if they can avoid it?
Not even for a minute suggesting that women should not be allowed to work in dangerous environments. Having said that no one wants to subject themselves to dangerous work and it is perhaps slightly easier for women to avoid that.
If women started working in dangerous environments that harms their bodies, it would have a direct impact on their reproductive ability..which on a large scale would be detrimental to the perpetuation of humans as a species and hence our survival. This is how we evolved. Not likely going to be a popular opinion, but it is mine.
Also remember lot (most) of Marxism predates Darwin and evolutionary biology. Even though Darwin and Marx were contemporaries. Since left is still quite based on Marxists ideas, it just does not account for many evolutionary biology theories and hence tends to find reasons which do not explain things correctly.
I would take it one step further. Marxists/Leftists generally discount time as a variable entirely. It's all about addressing a concerns in the present. There's very little to no considering to the impact of time. There are two ways this disregard of time manifests itself. First, is what you mentioned, in that there is no consideration for the value of wealth building, which (1) takes time and effort, and (2) produces the greatest returns over multiple generations (Basically, every one of us are standing on the shoulders of our ancestors). The second is preference for distributing the fruits of labor in the present equitably instead of using the fruits of labor to create greater returns in the future.
While not specifically about time, the difference principle in Rawl's Original Position is also relevant. Under that principle, inequality is permissible if it can lead to the worst off being better off than they would if there were equality. This principles presupposes that time is considered when trying to maximize well being for the worst off. If you want to maximize the well being of the worst off in the present, you implement equality right now, but that may be worse for the worst off in the future.
Factory work was not yet as common place as America and England in many other countries. Ford assembly lines were not yet widely used when WW1 broke out, most of the WW1 was fought with less industrialized weaponry.
That's partly it, but what I really meant was that America didn't have many combat casualties, relative to other countries. 53,400 according to Wikipedia, which was less than Canada's 56,600, and much less than France's 1,150,000 or Germany's 1,800,000.
The US basically wasn't a major combatant in that war, so it's not a representative country to use as an example. I'm sure it does show that factory conditions were brutal, but it falsely implies that they were more brutal than combat conditions.
> Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “STEM,” as it’s known—are female.
I used to live in Russia in my teenage years and went to school there until grade 9. One thing that I remember being distinctly different from public education in the US is that the course selection was provided by the school each year and students had no say in this process. The benefit of this is being exposed to subjects that you thought you wouldn't like, but ended up gravitating towards after completing the course work. Not saying that Algeria uses similar technique in their public education, but I always wondered how much being able to select your class schedule keeps students away from discovering their potential in areas where they didn't know they could excel.
>One thing that I remember being distinctly different from public education in the US is that the course selection was provided by the school each year and students had no say in this process
I grew up in the US and that was my experience as well. There were no "optional" classes until high school, but even then only one or two of my classes were my own choice.
Even when there were optional courses the school made it clear the only real option was band/choir/french/german/spanish (I think there was home-ec and shop courses available too). There was one hour free that you could pick one of the above, in theory you didn't have to take math and science the last year, but they made it clear that if you had any hope of college you better not skip them. I found out the hard way that band/choir were not really options because my college wouldn't admit me without the foreign language (I had to do catch up classes)
The conclusion there was parental authoritarianism (especially dads) was a primary cause. My own family is part Muslim so I have direct experience. Every child must be an engineer or doctor. As the Atlantic article notes, women in the West have more freedom to NOT choose STEM.
Two possible explanations: A) Biology is a real thing and genders have differences that extend beyond their gonads. B) Nope. It is all sexism, always, and these Scandinavian women are just traversing an uncanny valley of internalized misogyny.
If you look at the scatterplot excluding the four countries at the bottom right (Algeria, Turkey, Tunisia, UAE), you get basically a circle and (to my eye anyway) the trendline is horizontal, meaning, no correlation.
Moreover, there are two countries with approximately the same gender inequality but many fewer women in STEM, namely Qatar and Korea.
It seems to me that reducing this to "the more gender equality, the fewer women in tech" is a stretch! You could have just as easily written a headline to the effect of, "Turkey and three northern African countries have a higher percentage of women in STEM than almost anywhere in the world, including places that have the same gender (in)equality, like Qatar and S. Korea. Why is that?"
> If you look at the scatterplot excluding the four countries at the bottom right (Algeria, Turkey, Tunisia, UAE), you get basically a circle and (to my eye anyway) the trendline is horizontal, meaning, no correlation.
Their hypothesis doesn't predict a straight line.
Rather, they're saying that free women don't tend to choose STEM as often as men in the same society choose STEM. If they're correct, then we should expect a lack of data points in the top-right quadrant, above those 4 you pointed out, as such points would represent free societies in which women do pick STEM.
For there to be a straight line, we'd have to further assume that oppressive societies always force women into STEM, which doesn't follow. For example, early-1900's America didn't grant women freedom, but it didn't force them into STEM, either.
"Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women.... Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “stem,” as it’s known—are female."
Wait, so they're comparing computer science with all of STEM? That might obfuscate the picture. It should be STEM:STEM.
Edit: Perhaps I am not being clear but computer science is a subset of STEM, so even within the US, the number of people going into STEM > Computer Science. Comparing STEM in country X with CS in country Y seems like the wrong comparison.
"STEM" was this thing that was invented to drum up interest in fields that were in high demand. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of scientists, engineers, or mathematicians. The shortage is in technology.
I'm pretty sure it has been proven most genius women go into medicine and most genius men go into engineering. The genius part means you get to pick your path. Biological imperatives are at play.
Nothing in his post is sexually discriminatory, and stereotyping women as more inclined to select medicine is not even negative (whether it’s correct or not), so admonishment in place of debate is not necessary. Medicine is far more prestigious and more highly compensated than engineering.
I think the truth of the matter is that you cannot dictate what people feel passionate about or what they need to do. For example, people in Algeria or from my region of South Asia study the sciences because it is a way to better incomes in the future.
Simply giving people all the opportunity in the world will not guarantee that they will take up that opportunity. Just because you offer someone a carrot does not mean that that person will bite.
When people are more equal they will have more reason to differentiate. Women in countries like Norway tend to choose more professions based on the alignment with their gender. Men in the same country are known to have more typical "guy" hobbies and toys. It's basically a catch-22.
People ask me how The Atlantic differs from Harper's. Here is a good example. Harper's would _not_ run an article that would even suggest a crack in the framework of leftist orthodoxy.
But noting the date of the article, would this article be published now that Mrs Jobs is at the helm? Perhaps not...
The Atlantic was bought by Laurene Powell Jobs in July 2017[0], about nine months before this article was published.
I've stopped asking people not to make such accusations without any evidence. But could you at least check if the most basic facts do not contradict them?
OK, not really. But when I get into a discussion with people about the Atlantic, I give them my view on how it differs from Harper's, the other longform American magazine that is over 150 years old.
It's pretty obvious once you stop with ideology and politics.
When STEM is your only shot at a comfortable life - you go STEM if you can, even if you don't want to. When it's not - you pursue your interests instead.
I have no doubt that women face adversity, often in the form of sh__ty behavior during their STEM careers, so I'm not particularly surprised by accounts of it. I'm far less sanguine about the idea that they face more of it than men, as I've been on the receiving end of a lot of it myself (some life-changing).
The headline does this article a disservice. The data does not boil down so cleanly (as the article itself points out clearly) and to leave out the other factors it discusses is to invite false conclusions.
I realize that it's difficult to write a headline that is both scientifically precise and short, but the point remains.
What are you saying it leaves out? From my reading of the article the only obvious other cause would be that countries with lower gender equality also tend to have worse social support systems, which would allow people to pursue their desires more than otherwise - but that still leaves open the question of why those differences affect women more than men.
It's good that the article mentions poverty and interest in STEM, but they plotted the participation in STEM against Gender Equality instead of say, affordability to survive on minimum wage. They are literally quoting a study on the effects of basically poverty of a country, and then decide to plot against gender gap? Seems like they are trying to sell a narrative instead of understanding the issue fully.
It also seems odd the amount of information they glance over to create their narrative.
In the article, there's a video that mentions a ton of facts.
Among the facts: Women make up 18% of CS engineers. 1:4 computing jobs are held by women. I'm no math genius, but this actually seems to dispel the myth of women just aren't hired in tech. I mean, if they are 18% of CS engineering graduates, you'd expect them to hold slightly < 1:5 computing jobs, not 1:4.
What if I just post an alternative hypothesis without any apologies? Let’s find out...
Perhaps women in general are less interested than men in problems that require long stretches of “cold” and abstract reasoning, including building back-end software, and prefer activities that involve more human interaction or more frequent decisions involving “warmer” human elements such as aesthetics, human perception, relationship building, understanding everyday needs etc.
Also, perhaps women prefer more of a work-life balance, and not stretching themselves too thin when working on abstractions?
I always wonder why we just assume STEM are an attractive field to be in. Because if it is not attractive, then why would we want to force more women into it?
Maybe we should not be asking why there are so few women doing it but why there are so many men doing it.
Almost nobody who studied physics ends up doing physics.
Both men and women will do unfulfilling jobs if they need the money, but when it comes to investing into a career, women will more often choose one that leads to interesting and fulfilling jobs, while men tend to select for "return on investment". Men are much more likely than women to invest into an career that only has unfulfilling but well-paying job prospects.
I view this is a defect in men, not a sign of oppression.
Men are the victim of reactionary gender stereotypes and think they have to study something that will lead to them being able to provide for a family.
Look at, for example, container ship crew or workers on an oil platform. Clearly both genders can do those jobs, but almost only men will actually do it. Oil workers are getting paid exceptionally well. Not sure about container ship crews, maybe that was not a great example.
That people refer to it as a 'paradox' only confirms their very entrenched, possibly ideological view of reality, to the point wherein 'real life data' that calls into question that view ... is considered 'strange'.
It's not a paradox, it's just reality, probably easily explained (in very crude terms) by the fact that men and women are different, ergo, different outcomes. 'Gender' is a very powerful construct with underlying physical aspects, and it's just a part of who we are.
So we can try to make sure everyone has a real chance (taking into account systematic issues i.e. it's really hard for the 'lone minority' in a group etc.), but going too far beyond that might be hard.
We've banned this account for using HN exclusively for ideological battle. Doing this will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't.
All this article tells me is that there's a problem regarding boys and reading and that we need to find ways to motivate boys into reading more.
Women aren't inherently better than men (obligatory "and viceversa") so if both are about as good in one area but one group is (only seemingly) better at another area, there clearly is an issue that needs addressing.
> Women aren't inherently better than men (and viceversa)
While I would agree that that is true, axiomatically, when discussing moral worth and human dignity (whether speaking in terms of gender identity or biological sex), it's very clearly not true when talking about, well, a whole lot of capacities with physiological components when speaking of either averages or distributions between the biological sexes. I mean, this is fairly obvious with biological capacities closely related to sex and reproduction (I don't think anyone is going to argue against the idea that biological females are inherently advantaged when it comes to childbearing), but strucural and hormonal (among other) sex differences have far wider impacts. Testosterone levels alone, which are clearly linked to though not strictly determined by biological sex, have fairly wide ranging impacts on physical capacities and psychology/behavior.
Jordan Peterson has highlighted this many times. As he puts it: in Scandinavia, which has gone further than any other country in promoting gender equality, as equality increases, the differences between the genders (interest, careers, other pursuits) INCREASE, not the other way around. This came as a big surprise to many.
It sounds like women who grow up hearing they can be whoever they want to be tend to not want to be techies. I don't blame them. If I were any good at anything else I wouldn't do STEM for a living, either. It's a thankless job best outsourced.
I've always wondered: Does encouraging women to pursue STEM subjects send the subconscious message that it isn't something they are naturally suited to? Ironically having the opposite effect?
I think that poster is referring to STEM as a whole. Software engineering is a small subset of STEM, and I'd argue that it is, surprisingly, both the most accessible and the most lucrative.
I mean software. Professional sports is also accessible and lucrative in the same way. Most white-collar professions secure their gravy trains through guild membership, insider knowledge, and personal relationships. Software, however, gets more competitive throughout a career, not less, and most people don't understand how obsessed they must be to keep up. I like that about it, and I didn't make it as an athlete, so it suits me, but most people that come into this profession would rather retire into management than keep up their coding skills for more than a few years.
These comments are wild and the headline is not great. I know this is a contentious issue and that people like to armchair philosophize about stuff like this, but I think the study conclusions warrant a lot of critical attention before you say anything about "equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome".
First off: this is one study. No matter where you fall on gender politics, I wouldn't hang anything too seriously on a single paper. Obviously gender discrimination has been a historical cause of the gender STEM gap; so are we saying that we've solved that particular problem? Is there still room to improve? How much room? To me it seems naive to assume the first one without lots of evidence, and this paper is not that.
Second: the regression shown in the article doesn't seem great. For one thing: there's a small cluster of countries with pretty high X values, and pretty low Y values which suggests that they have relatively high leverage over the results and should probably be excluded. If you cover up UAE, Tunisia, Algeria, and Turkey does the regression line make any sense at all? To me it seems way too steep, ie. leverage. (Maybe the authors talk about this in the paper, I can't get behind the paywall). Also my priors would be that there are a number of country- and regional-level effects at work for an issue like this. It would be way more informative if the authors were to perform subgroup regressions by region of the world, cultural factors, ecnomic factors, etc. It's very possible, for example, that these two variables have an opposite correlation within region, education system, etc, but appear to have a negative correlation on aggregate. Simpson's Paradox is real and can cut many ways.
Third: choice of metric. Per the article
"""In this study, the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with STEM degrees. That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects"""
This could be caused by a lot of things, but this suggests to me that the "Global Gender Gap" metric may not be giving us the whole picture. I think it's real hasty to draw basically any conclusions about eg. the US STEM culture based on this study. When the results suggest a paradox like this, I think it calls for looking at a variety of metrics to see if the same results are borne out repeatedly.
tl;dr there's a lot of research on the gender STEM gap, and a lot of people shooting from the hip in these comments.
This isn't new information. Not even sort of new. This has been known for quite some time (20-30 YEARS). Jordan Peterson has also mentioned it numerous times over the years but the original studies are quite old.
Yet people are shocked to learn this because this data/facts aren't liked by politicians and even some scientists so it doesn't get discussed. Not sure why. There's nothing wrong with having different preferences. But some people like to pretend everyone is more or less exactly the same and want to do the same things and the only reason to differ would be societal influence.
The odd thing is that the same people who talk about there being no inherent biological differences between sexes then go ahead and talk about 'male aggression'. The amount of people that employ mental gymnastics to justify saying both these things is amazing. In fact the attacks I've seen on Peterson have bordered on the downright delusional/incoherent.
It's perfectly possible to consider traits to be culturally assigned to the genders and not biologically determined, and still complain about them. Complaining about innate (and therefore unchangeable) biological traits would actually be somewhat useless.
Besides, nobody denies the existence of biological differences. It's pretty obvious that women tend to have breasts and men tend not to. What's being criticised is:
- Misinterpreting culturally-enforced differences as biological and therefore fixed. Hair length, for example, could be misinterpreted as a difference between the sexes if any aliens did a quantitative study without ever noticing the barbers. Job choices could very well be similar, except the process how they are culturally reinforced are less obvious.
- Making decisions affecting individuals based on group differences (biological, culturally, or imagined): Even if women are 2% at picking stocks, using that information only to hire Alice and not Bob will lead to the wrong decision in 45% of cases because the differences between individuals swamp the group averages.
It's true that few on the left will assert that there are zero sex-based average behavioral differences, but you can't deny that it makes most progressives...uncomfortable. I'm pretty far left and I've seen it; people won't deny the possibility outright, but they'll look for every other possible explanation first, even if they sound substantially less plausible.
My point is the article is biased away from any conclusions that are biological.
From the study the article is quoting:
> in nearly all countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than had enrolled. Paradoxically, the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees rose with increases in national gender equality
This is only paradoxical if you're presuming men and women are NOT attracted to different things. Experiments with little kids before they can even process coherent though, and across cultures, have produced quite conclusive statistical evidence that there's innate gender differences (preferences of color, of soft vs spinney/mechanical things, etc) that don't fit the 'evil men suppressing women through artificial social constraints' narrative.
I think it's safe to say that board games are kinda STEM-related? I go to a local fantasy/SF club that's dominated by board gaming. There are lots of STEM students in there due to location, also plenty of programmers. And very few girls, and the only woman over 30 is mentally <inoffensive word>.
No, there's no beer, no cigarettes, no posters with elves in g-strings, that sort of thing. It's almost as if girls and young women weren't really interested in that. The few that do occasionally show up gravitate towards LARPs, pen&paper RPG games, and RPG-ish board games like Arkham Horror. If anything, I think those activities are more associated with toxic and sexist behavior and subtexts. I mean those are the people that spend lots of time in the same company, often in pubs or cellars, as opposed to board games where there are always people coming and going.
I don't know why, but very few young women come to us to play heavier or more competitive board games and we have several games going at any given time. And because board game renaissance is pretty recent in my country, there's absolutely no possibility it's traditionally male.
I'm for equal opportunities, but I think differences between sexes are not limited to physical. It's hard to pinpoint the tendencies, but they seem to be there. I mean look at smaller guys - they often have confidence issues and the ones I know are gym rats. They are also more afraid to go out after dark. Would it be crazy to think that people who evolved having about 20% less muscle mass also got some related mental differences?
More than likely, the reason others avoid you is because once it became a distinct group huddled around a table nerding out about a technical board game, it became intimidating to join. Hell, I was raised playing D&D and other games, am male, have a computer science degree, and even I feel intimidated walking up to another table of gamers.
The same thing applies in reverse when you're with your mates at a pub. You want to go over and talk to a girl, but she's surrounded by her army of friends who are forming a social barricade that is intimidating to enter.
Those girls don't want to leave their comfortable social circle and risk entering this unknown board game world either. Here are a bunch of guys who all "know" this game and she has to enter into it not just from a social disadvantage, but also a gaming skill disadvantage. That's a tough ask for anyone, male or female. People do not like to enter social situations where they feel isolated.
Even if you were all a bunch of ripped, attractive, friendly, well dressed, wealthy, and obviously social gents, you'd still probably find women don't waltz right up to you and your friends playing a game of Scythe or some other complex strategy game.
If you want people to join your game, you have to go out of your way to make the game environment approachable to other people.
This means playing simpler games, inviting people over, and including other fun things to ease them into it. This means networking outside of just going to a board game cafe and hoping a girl will come through the door. You have to go out and find those wonderful people yourself.
NOTE: this can be really hard, cause the same way you and your friends are hiding out in this board game cafe, so are all those other like-minded individuals. They're also hiding away in basements, back alley cafes, etc, playing board games.
Remember, the reason you're into this hobby is because you've been a gaming fan for years. If we take away all your prior knowledge of games, you too would be anxious to jump right into the thick of it.
I think you jump to conclusions too easily. There are usually a few (2-3) groups that play similar kinds of games as me that do NOT contain me at the moment. If it was about me personally, I'd see women in the complimentary group, just not in mine. That is not the case. I usually play in any of the groups except one, which has people I personally don't like. We have a lot of table jumping and newcomers, in fact it's rare to have a match when no one needs to be introduced to the rules of the game. The nature of the club is also that we rarely play the same game twice in a row.
This! I have said this so many times and all my girl friends hate me for it!
I also believe in gender segregated schools(after HS and at university level). I am not advocating gender segregation but just gender segregated education.
This is only a BS theory of mine..and so I am trying to work it into my hobby fiction writing. Please allow me to test it here for opinions.
I think that in formative years, children should not be gender segregated, but when rubber hits the road at specialized and advanced education, it’s better if there is gender segregation because there is so much competition and rivalary between genders when both are at peak reproductive phase.
I tend to be on the biology trumps/mind rules body/nature vs nurture side of the camp. I believe that there will be equality between the genders and less conflict if they don’t compete with each other in the same space. This might bring out the innate strengths and better intellectual capabilities of both genders because fundamentally they clash and neutralization absorbs the explosion of what good might come out of great human potential.
This is not just in an intellectual setting. Last week I had a voice quivering, temple throbbing, blue vein screaming episode at a guy I hired to do some work. I just lost it.
It’s a constant battle of wits dealing with men that it’s exhausting. It’s even worse than in an office environment because men think the tasks that involve physical prowess is their domain. They simply will NOT take orders from a woman. And it’s exhausting trying to make every instruction sound like a ‘suggestion’. I am running out of time and honestly the man was just using brute strength to achieve what physics could do...
And for every grudging acceptance of my way of doing things, I had to endure dumbass flirting. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. And then after every attempt to puff his chest, I have to listen to him talk about his wife because now he feels guilty for flirting. And it’s stuff I don’t need to hear.
And this is a person I am PAYING to work FOR me. I can’t even wrap my head around it. I had spent another part of my life in office environments and it was just the same. It’s better farming because it’s easier to cut off people if I have the right machine for the job.
I think there ought to be a jobs boards and work spaces for JUST WOMEN. It was the same during my years of education. I went to a co-Ed school and I loved it. My college education was at a nun run women’s only college. And I LOVED it.
As a man, I'll say I absolutely agree. I went to an all-boys high school, and teenage boys simply do better without girls around. Boys are more likely to engage in not traditionally masculine activities when girls are not around because there is no need to impress. Furthermore, girls often mature faster than boys, and this leads to unnecessary stress for both girls and boys at this stage. Furthermore, a lot of what drives teenage boys is competing against other boys for attention from girls. This dynamic is messed up if there are girls around. This damages girls too. Girls often complain that boys are uninterested in competing with them. This is because beating a girl does nothing for boys. They want to compete with boys. If each gender has their space, they both get to flourish.
I don't think single sex environments harm future gender relations either. If anything, they make it better. Both genders need friends of the same gender uncomplicated by romantic feelings. Furthermore, from my own experience, the boys at my high school, and the girls at our sister school, found no trouble getting married, having kids, etc.
Speaking of our sister school, the women they produced were independent minded, competent, competitive, and had leadership experience. Without the need to compete with boys, the girls developed their own leadership and competitive structures that they excelled at.
> Without the need to compete with boys, the girls developed their own leadership and competitive structures that they excelled at.
I think there are several arenas where girls and women benefit when men are excluded; secondary education isn't the only one. A few others to mention:
- Sports and physical competition. Excluding men enables women to compete on their own plane, set world records, etc.
- Restrooms, locker rooms, and the like. Excluding men protects women from unwanted advances, privacy invasions, etc. I know this isn't a popular opinion, but the primary benefit of segregated restrooms is that women do not have to be afraid to go to the bathroom. Besides sanitation, this is one of the greatest benefits to society of having restrooms in the first place. (In areas with no restrooms, such as rural India, women often have to risk being molested when trying to relieve themselves.)
Another unpopular opinion: desegregation efforts in the above areas (including those motivated by wanting to achieve "gender equality" or allow transgender women into areas designated for women only) will result in harm to women.
Another one is public transport. I have been groped a few times during peak transit time in the BART. It was incredibly unpleasant and ruined the whole week for me. It’s creepy and the violation of personal space feels like rape.
Well, that seems to be the policy solution that Japan picked. In addition to the cultural development of well-intentioned men holding their hands in the air on crowded mass-transit to prove their good intentions, and thus throwing suspicion on men who don't do the same.
Though it's worth noting that mass-transit in Japan is frequently packed so tight that if you don't have your hands up, you're literally touching someone else anyway. Not hard to see how that amplifies the molestation problem significantly in Japan even if other countries (presumably) have the same % of men with a propensity towards such actions.
I really can't overstate how skeptical I am of all the supposed benefits of gender-segregated schooling when attendance of a gender-segregated school is so strongly correlated with socioeconomic class.
I agree that all of your explanations fall well on my metaphorical ears. They seem right, and I can nod along while I read them.
But I can't help but have a nagging suspicion that you'd get extremely similar results if you just tossed a random sample of kids into a school after filtering for household income > $XXX,XXX/yr.
I'd also argue that even if you compared gender segregated schools vs a mixed-gender private school of the same price, you'd still be left with a confounding variable of "whose parents clearly valued education enough that they either specifically picked, or tolerated (depending on their views on this matter) a gender segregated school.
Remember that parental involvement is a very powerful predictor of academic success (though I'll admit I don't know if it trumps the predictive power of just socioeconomic class).
Socioeconomic class wrt schools is directly related to people’s reproductive choices. What you say is absolutely correct.
How I see it is that the burden is on people who choose to bring children into this world. It’s an important decision. It is the basis of our evolution. The answer to the question re whether my progeny or kin can compete for the same limited resources. Economically lower classes of the population need cohesive and supportive communities that will act as the village..as it were..to collectively raise children. It is the strengthening secret sauce. Community and community support is everything here.
And of course..that’s wildly variable. There is no way to come up with standardized solutions. However, if we look at it as a resource issue..of resource allocation and resource density rather than a species encompassing human collective issue, we can find solutions for all.
It’s difficult to see this as a resource issue rather than a people issue, but smaller tight knit communities with minimal socio economic deltas work better than trying to homogenize large populations inefficiently.
> I really can't overstate how skeptical I am of all the supposed benefits of gender-segregated schooling when attendance of a gender-segregated school is so strongly correlated with socioeconomic class.
I went to an all boys school with mostly working class boys of color (54% hispanic, 26% white, 13% asian, 6% black -- 75% non-white students ) next to Compton, though, so while I do agree that private schooling is associated with higher socioeconomic class, that was not my experience, and all I gave was my experience.
>This is not just in an intellectual setting. Last week I had a voice quivering, temple throbbing, blue vein screaming episode at a guy I hired to do some work. I just lost it.
>It’s a constant battle of wits dealing with men that it’s exhausting. It’s even worse than in an office environment because men think the tasks that involve physical prowess is their domain. They simply will NOT take orders from a woman. And it’s exhausting trying to make every instruction sound like a ‘suggestion’. I am running out of time and honestly the man was just using brute strength to achieve what physics could do...
Female managers I know and under who I worked don't seem to face these problems. Did you consider the possibility, that the problems you face aren't caused by your gender but rather by your skills as a manager?
You could be right. I have considered that, but not wanting to be in a traditional manager position is one of the reasons I came to farming. I have since realized that it’s no better for women here too.
Because of inappropriate touching, boundary testing conversation, bone headed adherence to defense of a lack of skill and zero inclination to accept sensible advice.
I am not seeking judgement. Or asking that people believe me. That has no value to me. It was an example of my reality.
It’s an example of how I don’t have this added aggression and hassle if I worked with an all female team. Things just get done quicker if I work in all women team. It’s like we have a hive mind.
It’s always good to have options out. Many men and women work well together without conflict. But I don’t think work places should be forcing some kind of golden ratio for men and women.
What is important is that 1. Work gets done. 2. We extract maximum efficiency for maximum reward 3. Minimize conflict and increase productivity + work satisfaction.
If this can be achieved with gender segregation at work/school, then why fight it in the name of gender equality.
Yeah, it's an interesting idea. I don't think the current political climate would allow it however. Folks are likely too sore about past forms of segregation to entertain the concept.
Most good employees do this quarterly at performance reviews. Asking for feedback is absolutely the norm, and good managers will give it to an employee in an honest fashion. I've seen truculent employees of either gender giving a hard time to managers of either gender.
I also don't think that the sort of screaming you described is ever an appropriate activity in which any manager should engage. If you don't like the work he's doing, fire him; a "a voice quivering, temple throbbing, blue vein screaming episode" is never appropriate.
I think yelling is a signal to attract attention in a fear inducing/adrenaline charged situation. I was a little fearful for my own safety and I figured that if I was loud enough, someone would hear me if things got out of control.
To clarify: this wasn’t an office environment. This person was a tradesman and we were working alone with a lot of heavy tools around.
So this is incredibly misguided and sexist. But I've lived as a man and a woman, I feel qualified to comment.
The problem is that society holds men and women to a different standard: women are expected to be in control of their emotions / self and men are not. If a woman's emotions come out (screaming or whatever) then she's unhinged, irrational. If a man does it, he's just blowing off steam or asserting himself. Men are not often held accountable for taking their emotions out on people, be they anxiety, depression or insecurity -- so it's not a skill that most men have a chance to develop. This is about societal attitudes held by both men and women, not anything that men have done wrong.
In reality, there are men who can control their emotions and not inflict them on others. It takes the right personality, a nurturing upbringing or lots of therapy, but they exist. It took me a lot of work to learn how to control my emotions to a degree that was considered appropriate for a woman -- even though my behavior hadn't changed. I'm still working on it. But I'm a better person for it regardless of gender, and I think everyone should be held to a high standard on owning their feelings and not inflicting them on those around us.
> women are expected to be in control of their emotions / self and men are not
> Men are not often held accountable for taking their emotions out on people, be they anxiety, depression or insecurity
I think a more accurate framing is that women are not allowed to be angry or aggressive, and men are not allowed to be sad or vulnerable. In public, at least. Consider how much more tolerable, and therefore common, it is for a woman to cry in public than a man.
So when men feel anxiety, depression, or insecurity, they express it in the socially acceptable way for men: anger and irritability. Presumably women feel angry a lot more frequently than they show, and have to find other ways to channel it. However, the latter is changing, because it is becoming much more acceptable for women to be angry and aggressive than it used to be.
Angry or aggressive behaviour is not socially acceptable for men, at least where I come from. Men are mostly expected to just not exhibit emotions publicly.
I guess part of my point is that men's emotions end up coming out whether they want them to or not. In trying to suppress one type of expression, it surfaces in other ways (anxiety disguised as "high standards" or "hard working" is a huge one here).
I had a Saudi colleague in mathematics who said she'd never experienced discrimination in mathematics in Saudi Arabia, simply because every mathematician she worked with on a daily basis was also female.
Saudi culture is sort of orthogonal to American culture, but it was an interesting comment.
I think you are probably right, though you could have left your diatribe about the men who work for you out. One could easily come up with equally typical scenarios to ridicule neurotic, shallow and emotionally unstable women. Each gender has its set of typical pathologies. But somehow we made it work, together, as a species, so there is some magic in the balancing the two.
Why is it a ‘diatribe’? It is my life. It is my work.
That each gender has its own set of pathologies is exactly my point. When they don’t complement each other, why not create an environment where each of us can be our best?
I didn’t mean to paint all men like so..I was giving an example of one instance in my own life experience..one of many that has shaped my opinion re gender segregation in higher education and work place. It was the most recent example that explained my own motivation to evangelize gender segregation.
Sure. I don't understand the competition argument though. In my HS and College years it did not matter if the top student was a man or a women, it just mattered if it was you or someone else. And as far as I recall men and women were fairly evenly matched. Why do you think they should compete separately?
I had to think about this. As a heterosexual, I want to say chemistry.
(Others have brought to non binary individuals but I have to confess that I can’t make assumptions about their dynamics.)
Sometimes I feel the same way with problem solving as I do when I am attracted to a person. It makes me wonder if competition and inter personal romantic chemistry are related wrt how our brain perceives it.
And there is limited/fixed mental bandwidth that we can only focus on one at a time? Just wool gathering..off the top of my head. What do you think?
> I think that in formative years, children should not be gender segregated, but when rubber hits the road at specialized and advanced education, it’s better if there is gender segregation because there is so much competition and rivalary between genders when both are at peak reproductive phase.
That's probably the right general idea, but I think you have the time frame wrong. Separate classes starting around 5th grade (10 years old), joining back after high school.
I base this on brain development stages. After several years of childhood, your brain starts reorganizing itself. It prunes a bunch of connections, and strengthens others. This processes takes several years. It generally starts earlier in girls, around 10 or 11 years old, and later, around 15, in boys.
So starting around age 10 or 11, we have boys and girls of the same age at significantly different stages of brain development, which I suspect means that teaching methods that are best for the boys aren't best for the girls, and vice versa. Hence, separate classes would be better.
Once it starts in boys, the initial changes are more rapid than they were in the girls, so boys do catch up although in some areas it does take a long time. So probably no need to separate classes by gender at college or beyond.
Ok. I don’t know what you want me to say. You made queries about my comment. I attempted to answer it. How you interpret it is not my concern. But thanks for your feedback.
Work places discriminating based on gender would be terrible. There shouldn't be "male only" work places just like there shouldn't be "female only" work places.
This would be a regression to the dark ages of grouping and separating people based on biological identity, not a good idea and honestly not helpful.
There is zero evidence that shows these ideas actually make students or working environments healthier and more productive.
Well..we could always give it a try as an experimental space and see if it works. No harm in learning more. Obviously it’s not the dark ages anymore. Why shouldn’t we adopt practices and check what works if it makes the world a better happier place?
I disagree. I think pay scale disparities would also disappear if women had gender segregated work spaces. It would be a more supportive environment and less conflict. I suspect efficiency would also improve at work places. Throw a picnic or party or twice a week meeting or something for everyone to meet up...but having equal strength and equally compensated and mirror hierarchies of gender segregated work places would be a good experiment.
I don’t know how non binary people would feel about this and would like to hear more from them.
> pay scale disparities would also disappear if women had gender segregated work spaces.
Okay so here's the thing. Even with my typically-European limited view into the salaries of others at my work places, from what I've observed and from the statistics I have consulted the actual "pay scale disparities" between genders are tiny / non-existent if you compare the same jobs. There is a major difference in gender-split GDP (~15-25 % depending on the country), but that is mostly down to women and men having different distributions of jobs, and not down to women getting paid less for the same work. Whether, globally speaking, different job distributions are a major issue, is an open debate.
I'm not understanding what the gender segregation during advanced/specialized education is meant to accomplish. Also, can you expand on this: "I believe that there will be equality between the genders and less conflict if they don’t compete with each other in the same space". Is that space referring just to school or even further than that?
I want to preface with ‘only in my experience’, ok?
Men are a distraction while trying to focus on work/studies. And they are constantly vying for attention too and it’s flattering.
From my perspective as female, it took a lot of my mental space and time to engage male attention. First we take a lot more time to groom ourselves. Physical attractiveness is time consuming for women(just trust me on this) and there is also competition amongst women ..but in a different way than how men compete with each other.
At the risk of generalizing, I would say that women/girls are more mental/emotional than men..these emotional space shares the same mental bandwidth as the focus and concentration required to do work at hand.
Again..I am generalizing and I want to say that this is my opinion only.. women need to learn how to compartmentalise their mental spaces. I would likely have several mental ‘rooms’...one for work..one for family..one for fun..one for men(or more depending on how many men catch my interest etc). The key is to manage traffic of thoughts and bandwidth to each of these rooms.
I won’t pretend to know how men think. (But would like to know more!), but my gut instinct suggests to me that men have different thought processes and mental modes than women.
So your hypothesis is that all of this `overhead` (mental space/time) would be removed or at least reduced if men only worked with other men and women only worked with other women? I guess the first thought is that this only considers heterosexuality. Then there's the fact that these are generalizations, and so the premises don't apply to everybody. Do you put more effort into your appearance just because there will be men there or because it's a work environment and you want to be professionally presentable?
I guess the traditional thinking is that we want to have different thought processes and mental modes all working and collaborating together as much as possible. Wouldn't it be limiting to a lot of people to cut off interaction just because of their sex? Is there really a certain way that only men think and a different certain way that only women think?
I'm trying to think of my own work environment where I, as a man, am actually in the minority on my team. I just can't think of a project where I think that gender or sex made any difference to anything. Maybe since we're programmers and not dealing with lifting heavy things it's different? We also have a good mix in the leaders. I've had both female and male project managers, tech leads, team members, etc. I've seen all kinds of mixes of personalities between the genders too. I guess, only in my experience, I can't find a time where I feel a team of only men or only women would have done something better.
This is very strange to me. Have you asked the women in the team? I feel like no one would say that they prefer to work in segregated environments. Which is why it easy for me to say it as an outsider without any consequence. I say it because I have heard both genders have reservations about working as a team with the other gendered colleagues and peers.
There is no coming back from a politically incorrect comment after it’s out in the open. Gender segregation at high school/college was my original position..not at work necessarily. Altho that would be suitable for some group dynamics. This is just one such position.
I feel like somewhere along this thread it morphed from gender segregated educational environment(the original post was about STEM and gender) to work. I probably am partly responsible for that with my subsequent comments. Altho..I will read your comment again in leisure, consider my response and get back to you as soon as possible. Regards.
No, I don’t think I could present that question appropriately. The work part came up because one of your anecdotes in your original comment referred to a work scenario. I guess I assumed that you wanted segregation there, also, because of that.
I don’t know. I have a few non binary friends. I find them more artistically inclined rather than STEM inclined.
I feel like creative pursuits tend be more collaborative and thrives better when there is more inter personal energy. Study(for me at least) is solitary. Artists and creative people flourish when there is a lot of back and forth of energies and they birth something from those interactions.
Within my circle of friends and acquaintances, I find that Uber-STEM thinking people are either asexual and/or autistic.(is there a correlation there? I don’t know..I haven’t looked into any studies about that) In my mind, I visualize both characteristics as though it is the blunt end of the emotional/social quotient. Obviously there are many who are in the middle and balanced, as it were..I am just picking on the ones see-sawing on both spectrums.
And I'm just kind of confused on, if there are specific gender-specific education, what happens to people who are agender, third gender, etc. Do they get to choose their own education, or is it assigned to them? How would they even know before self-actualization is fully realized in the brain for them to explore their own identities?
To clarify: I am not saying that education must be segregated. I am just saying that spaces...personal spaces must be segregated. I am suggesting this because how/what women consider ‘personal space’ is different from how/what men consider ‘personal space’.
Speaking for myself..I can focus and concentrated better when my personal space is my domain..physical space as well as emotional/mental domain. I draw concentric circles around me and assign people there so they won’t cross the threshold of their boundaries. I have noticed that if they cross the assigned boundaries, my sense of everything becomes confusing and I am befuddled. There is tremendous loss of mental energy and time to rearrange everything back to where it belongs for optimal functioning.
But does this mean nonbinary people shouldn't get personal spaces, or their own personal space, and what happens when someone is genderfluid, etc, do they have to shift their personal space each time they feel more male/female?
I'm mostly just trying to understand how this is applicable within my circle of friends.
I'm confused- what are you listening for? I'm actually trying to listen to you and applying this philosophy that different gender identities require different spaces with my reality that there is a sizeable portion of the population that do not fall strictly on "male" or "female" identity.
Right. Like I said throughout this exchange, I don’t know.
I also think gender segregation should be an option. It is not a clear line demarcating the genders and separating them at the work place. Many men and women work well together in the same work place. My original comments were towards higher education in high school and college to remove the distraction of genders competition with different core strengths towards the same goal/standard.
I am not advocating gender segregation but just gender segregated education.
That's quite literally what you're arguing for. Doesn't "jobs board and work spaces for JUST WOMEN" sound familiar to you? You're advocating for bringing us back the 1960s, and worse, the argument you're using is eerily close to "separate but equal." The format of that and "separate water fountains" is identical.
It’s a constant battle of wits dealing with men that it’s exhausting. It’s even worse than in an office environment because men think the tasks that involve physical prowess is their domain. They simply will NOT take orders from a woman. And it’s exhausting trying to make every instruction sound like a ‘suggestion’. I am running out of time and honestly the man was just using brute strength to achieve what physics could do...
And for every grudging acceptance of my way of doing things, I had to endure dumbass flirting. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. And then after every attempt to puff his chest, I have to listen to him talk about his wife because now he feels guilty for flirting. And it’s stuff I don’t need to hear.
Why not fire him?
Granted, given the obnoxious use of caps lock and lack of critical thinking skills, you probably run a small business. If so, you should be aware that companies are legally allowed to segregate for any reason under a certain level of employees.
Wow, it turns out that much to the protestations of the left, women are in fact not men, and given more equality of opportunity and freedom to choose will gravitate more towards fields suited to their natures, on average. This was common sense a generation or two ago, but now feels like heresy to speak out loud. Certainly a fireable offense (just ask James Damore!)
How about the 'forbidden fruit' syndrome? What if hard-to-get-into STEM attracts the girls who are naturally competitive and strong-willed, who want to SHOW THEM? In that case easing the resistance could also lower the perceived attractiveness.
I know it's not a popular opinion, but consider a company analogy. People who leave because they're not competent have a tendency to badmouth the company. I'm not saying all of them do, and all that badmouth were incompetent. But there is a tendency to rationalize and lash out. What if women were calling those environments toxic because they had a hard time doing well in there?
There are absolutely toxic, hermetic, unpleasant environments. But we should at least permit considering the idea that people of different sexes have different abilities. I get sexist comments all the time (men can't distinguish colors, men can't multitask) and there are no white knights riding to my rescue.
Let's say you bring up an issue about a bug in software you're working on. Let's also say you didn't cause it. But the moment you talk about it, I respond, 'didn't the code you wrote yesterday have a bug?', 'isn't this code base from a reputed oss repo?' and so on.
Essentially my exact words don't mean that this is also your bug, but there is an (un)intended implication that you're a crappy developer. You're probably gonna latch on to that at the speed of light rather than giving a Data like logical response. That's the problem with bringing up such alternatives.
It alludes that women or minority will right away fall back to their gender or whatever when convenient. It also alludes that they don't know the weight of one such allegation, they aren't thinking about the effect it is going to have on their future employment opportunities (It so happens this kind of allegations true or not seriously affect your career, everyone starts to tiptoe around you at the least in your new job) - essentially attributes a lack of integrity and foresight.
IOW - I do agree that there is a very interesting question around what do we do about incompetent employees who happen to be a minority. I also know this line of responses are probably not going to be productive :)
Obviously I'm not going to test this myself, but I think the consequences of saying bad things about past work environment are less if you're leaving an industry altogether for a different career anyway. Or if you're asked by someone random like a journalist, who's not considering hiring you or telling the next recruiter.
If you rule out an idea without verification and forbid studies in the area, that's just a variant of "la la la la I can't hear you". It's childish, and taboo.
No, it could be a third variable or it could even be that women avoiding STEM somehow increases gender equality.
But regardless of the cause, if there is an inverse correlation then pursuing gender parity in STEM is at best a huge waste of effort and at worst counterproductive for all parties involved.
The graph in the article doesn't look too far removed from a cloud though, so I question the strength of the correlation.
And that is before you get into interests vs natural talent and how that does or does not affect ones success in a field. On a fundamental level I personally prefer equality of opportunity and freedom of choice.
As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument. Are there times when that is true? Absolutely. But, men do not have a monopoly on being jerks, creating toxic work environments or harassing people. Personally I've seen bad behavior from both sides. I've also seen exceptional talent, skill, empathy etc. come from both groups. Many corporate cultures are toxic to everybody, irregardless of your gender.
I'm sure this will be down voted, but it is what it is.