Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

When I was growing up, I was told that women were by and large too dumb to do any real science by teenage boys and girls.

I found great solace in Joan Feynman's story,

> “Women can’t do science, because their brains aren’t made for it,” Lucille Feynman declared to her eight-year-old daughter Joan. The news was a huge blow to the little girl’s ambitions which, at the time in 1935, were firmly set on following her brother Richard into a life scientific. “I remember sitting in a chair and weeping,” she recalls.

> whilst the doubts about a woman’s abilities to undertake a career in science, planted in her by Lucille, remained, Joan’s interest in science continued to be fuelled by Richard’s progress through university. Before he’d left home, her brother had made a deal with her that whilst away at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), studying for his bachelor’s degree, he would answer any science question that she sent him.

> “So I did,” says Joan, “and I got a little further each time. And then one day there was a figure in the book of a spectrum and underneath it said ‘the relative strengths of the Mg+ absorption line at 4,481 angstroms… of Stellar Atmospheres from the work of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’.” The caption was a revelation to Joan. Cecilia was a woman’s name, and the hyphenated family name indicated she was married. It was proof that a married woman was capable of doing science.

Representation matters. That one hyphenated name, proof that someone like her could contribute, gave us an exploration of auroras and solar wind. It enriched our world immensely.

If some other little girl, even one, can find solace in one of these wikipedia articles, then it's worth it.




> Representation matters

For some.

I wanted to be a Formula 1 pilot as a kid because I liked fast cars, not because pilots were men.

I wanted to be an astronaut because I was obsessed with space and spacesuits, but I saw them in comics where the protagonists where animals and I clearly wasn't.

You know, sometimes people like stuff because they like it, not because they saw a male or female name somewhere.

Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper existence has not discouraged me from becoming a male programmer and the fact that when I was a kid everyone said that knitting and crocheting were a girls' thing hasn't stopped me from learning them, it was a fun thing to do with my aunt.

> If some other little girl, even one, can find solace in one of these wikipedia articles, then it's worth it.

I read this sentence a lot, but there is no reason why we should believe it could happen.

If the fact that these people exist and are alive wasn't enough to make them known, what can a Wikipedia article about unknown people actually do?

Unless a marketing department with a budget pushes them to a larger audience under the assumption that they are important because they are women, regardless of the importance of to actual body of work they produced, they're gonna stay unknown.


If you want to be an X and are female, and then you see that 95% of people who do X are male... it's pretty rational to wonder if there's some social or selection barrier coming up that's going to make it difficult or impossible for you to do X. And that's if you even get to explicitly thinking about it: the message is so strong that "Xers are male" that many people will never take the leap of imagination.


> . it's pretty rational to wonder if there's some social or selection barrier coming up

That's a very modern take

Where I am from 90% of the people were farmers or worked in construction

I liked math and then I discovered computers, nobody in my circle knew about 'em, except one of my youngest uncles

People used to refer to it as "wasting time in front of a screen"

I have become a computer programmer nonetheless

People must understand that bubbles are much older than social networks and they were real bubbles, like people that never moved farther than a 100 kms from where they were born.

If this "theory" was true, we would all still be hunter gatherers.

People evolve despite the odds.

Columbus parents had a small shop that sold wine and cheese in a small city called Savona.

He became an explorer

Science as a profession is still not mainstream, there still an high chance of failing at it, it's pretty obvious that it is more common among people who are less risk adverse: young men.


> Columbus parents had a small shop that sold wine and cheese in a small city called Savona. He became an explorer

Outliers aren't too helpful in analyzing this. The question is: do people get discouraged from seeing few people like them doing something? Yes, in general, they do.

e.g. even if 99.9% of women get discouraged and avoids the profession as a result, every single one that doesn't is an exception one can point to. Individual outliers don't lend any basis for argument.

> If this "theory" was true, we would all still be hunter gatherers.

This isn't a very meaningful point. I'm not talking about things in disequilibrium. I'm saying, if you're a kid looking at a whole bunch of basketball players that are very differently shaped than you: maybe there's something wrong with your shape to go to the NBA. If you're a girl and see everyone working in math is male, you may rationally wonder about whether there's a path for you to succeed working as a mathematician.

(And you might also rationally wonder what life will be like if you're female in a 95% male industry).


> The question is: do people get discouraged from seeing few people like them doing something?

that's a good question and the answer is not definitively yes.

For a number of reasons.

First of all, there's the outlier and there are the pioneers.

Columbus was a pioneer (among others), not just an outlier.

Secondly, we don't have the data.

From my anecdotal experience as a long time tech worker, women are hired in greater numbers compared to the number of applications.

From my anecdotal experience and context (Europe, Italy) it's much harder to find them than men.

But when companies find them, they have no bigger problems than men to get the job.

I would say that if there are ten open positions and 20 men apply, 8 get the job, for the same job 3 women apply and 2 of them get the job.

I've been interviewing for the company I work for and I've adviced them to hire all the women that applied, not so much for men, approximately 1 in 2 is coming to the interview either under prepared or to test how much more they could ask to their actual employer.

> if you're a kid looking at a whole bunch of basketball players that are very differently shaped than you

There's a good chance that you are not fit for basketball.

Listen, I understand your point, I was a volleyball player in my teen years, I was good, not great, but I was shorter than most of the other players.

Turns out that's important to succeed as a professional player because other teams will get the tallest player they can find to win.

You are actively encouraged to persist if you're taller than average and discouraged if you're not and I think it's completely normal (of course there are exceptions, but the Karch Kiraly(s) don't grow on trees)

I did not succeed and that's ok. I wasn't crushed by that discovery, I just understood I wasn't playing in the same league of professionals.

It's nobody's fault.

In the same ballpark there's the fact that I probably succeeded as a programmer because I wasn't fit for volleyball and computers were much more satisfying.

If I was born 2 meters tall, maybe I would have abandoned CS for volleyball, who knows.

Maybe it's the same for other people too, they get more satisfaction from other jobs than science and choose them.


I don’t think many people have a problem with the concept of representation. Eg conservatives can have daughters and want them to be happy as well.

The issue that rubs many the wrong way is that advocates often simply replace one form of exclusion with the other. For example, at my local children’s science museum they have a large exhibit titled “this is what a scientist looks like”. It includes six large posters of women scientists. This is not “inclusive”. It’s also not uncommon. I’ve seen similar within some of my kid’s science classrooms.

Lastly, I think it’s not surprising that the example you quote is from the 1930s. Today’s bias (in the usa at least) is most definitely towards promoting female achievement.


> It includes six large posters of women scientists. This is not “inclusive”.

Yes it is. The aim of the diversity initiatives isn't to be neutral in their representative, pretending they exist in a vacuum, they are there to counter-act an existing bias in the world[1]. No boy is going to see that poster and think they can't be a scientist, because they're going to have grown up hearing about Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Hawking and listening to people like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The reason you think that the inclusion initiative is exclusionary is because you are factually wrong about the likelihood of women going into certain careers in the USA today. From that source I cited:

>For the 2017-2018 academic year, women secured 22% of all bachelor’s degrees in engineering, and just 19% of degrees in computer science.

So you can say airy things about the USA being biased towards promoting female achievement, but the fact is the statistics show that there are still lots of areas in which women demonstrably don't see certain career paths as options.

[1]:https://www.stemwomen.com/women-in-stem-usa-statistics


Has it ever occurred to you that men and women often have different interests and value different things, and what impact that might have on career paths?

90%+ of elementary school teachers are women, which means almost all kids are taught from a young age that women are teachers. Should society be doing more to get men into teaching young kids? Or can we accept that maybe most guys don't want to deal with kids all day long?


Let's assume you're 100% right, and that men and women simply just have different interests and values (which seems a bit of a push, since that's completely confounded by the fact this issue varies wildly internationally), then these outreach programmes will let girls and women know the options available to them, and the women will choose not to take those opportunities.

Society should absolutely be encouraging more men into teaching. But that's the classic conundrum - people are working to fix a problem and you come in and say "No, no, don't fix that problem, fix this problem instead". I agree with you - more men should be encouraged to go into teaching, we need great teachers and it can be a very rewarding career - why don't you go and do something to make that happen.


>But that's the classic conundrum - people are working to fix a problem and you come in and say "No, no, don't fix that problem, fix this problem instead".

That's a complete strawman, nobody is saying that. People are pointing out the hypocrisy. The only problems in society that get widespread attention and support, are problems that impact women.

So no, if you want to be taken seriously then there would need to be parity in how these issues are treated.


It's not a strawman, you literally are saying that people shouldn't work on women getting into STEM because they aren't also working on getting men into education. What I'm saying is those are two different tasks, and it's unreasonable for you to ask someone who is doing 1 good thing to stop doing it because you want them to do another thing that you think is good.

>So no, if you want to be taken seriously then there would need to be parity in how these issues are treated.

Firstly, they already are taken seriously. Secondly, go ahead and look, there are plenty of campaigns to try and get more men into early years education.


>you literally are saying that people shouldn't work on women getting into STEM because they aren't also working on getting men into education.

Are you replying to the wrong message, or intentionally not quoting what you say I "literally" said?

Meanwhile, I have also noticed there aren't enough women working in mines and on roofs, collecting garbage etc. so I'm off to start my campaign to help.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: