Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 157 posts

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#81

Post by rayiner »

curtis wrote: post #58
ffn wrote: post #39

Or it could be that tons of girls get sold into taking up the tech field at a young and impressionable age by presidential speeches, books telling them to "lean in", and articles like this that hint there is some conspiracy of men out there actively working to damage women and they are needed to right the wrong. Then, after spending 4+ years in college studying surface friction losses or CRDT applications without tom…

I feel like maybe you are overstating the case, but I gave you an upvote anyway, since I think there is a case to be made along those lines. I upvoted the article as well, for similar reasons.

What is the case to be made along those lines--a case based on evidence and not rank speculation?

I loved building software. Like nearly everyone here on HN, I put up with the drudgery of debugging race conditions in other peoples' code in return for the opportunity to work on the fun parts. Why should we credit an argument that presupposes that women wouldn't feel the same way? In particular, why should we credit that argument over the article's argument: that women leave the profession in greater numbers because men give them more of the drudgery and less of the fun stuff?

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#82

Post by sp332 »

rarec wrote: post #11

Is it also possible that the men are usually being more aggressive towards getting more interesting work? After all, in their example the girls could've just told the guys no and came to an agreement instead of just accepting their lot.

Yes. That's the conclusion of Valerie Coffman, who works in the industry and read the study, at the end of the article.

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#83

Post by Nadya »

RodericDay wrote: post #54
socrates1998 wrote: post #47

I think whenever you are a "minority" in anything you run the risk of being felt left out. If your group comprises only 20% of something, then it is always going to be an issue. The problem with the gender gap is that it will never go away. Prejudice against a race, ethic group, or religion is a mistake. People are generally people and we have more in common than we don't. And as time goes on, I think you will see th…

Lawyers and Doctors seem to be faring better than Programmers. "Because they wanted/didn't want to do it" isn't where the trail of inquiry ends, btw.

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

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

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

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

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

E:

Better choice of adverb: well -> poorly

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#84

Post by loco5niner »

sp332 wrote: post #33
loco5niner wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it would. Example: "Hey boss, why wasn't I assigned to X project?" is something someone more assertive would say.

If the women have to push back because the men got better assignments to begin with, that means the sexist behavior already happened. Women shouldn't have to play damage control constantly.

> If the women have to push back because the men got better assignments to begin with

That is quite the assumption. What if we consider the possibility that they were initially given assignments equally? Then, because some pushed back more than others, they ended up getting better assignments the next time around (and the next, and the next).

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#85

Post by cbanek »

I'm not sure this is actually a gender problem. I'm a woman, who has worked in big tech. Having done 12+ years, I've seen that you need to work on the right projects to get noticed and promoted.

On the other side, usually when a manager wants to get rid of someone, they just give them the crap work. It doesn't matter if they are a man or woman. It's part of the process of showing "we don't like you, so start looking for a job."

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#86

Post by zzalpha »

heartbreak wrote: post #23
MattGrommes wrote: post #12

I think using the word 'fun' in this title is demeaning and misleading. Women aren't looking for fun, they're looking for meaningful, interesting work and are being denied it. (Obviously not all women, etc. etc.) I know a very talented woman with more experience and talent than her teammates who constantly deals with the interesting work being given to men instead of her. In meetings men look to the other men for opi…

The example seems like a problem that quiet people have. Not all women are quiet, and not all quiet people are women.

Sure, but when you have a culture that punishes women for not being quiet by labeling them as aggressive, b*tchy, etc (after all, a certain presidential candidate often demeans his female opponent for "yelling" and so forth, despite that behaviour being perfectly acceptable in a man), you have now sown the seeds for gender bias.

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#87

Post by MattGrommes »

dang wrote: post #70
MattGrommes wrote: post #12

I think using the word 'fun' in this title is demeaning and misleading. Women aren't looking for fun, they're looking for meaningful, interesting work and are being denied it. (Obviously not all women, etc. etc.) I know a very talented woman with more experience and talent than her teammates who constantly deals with the interesting work being given to men instead of her. In meetings men look to the other men for opi…

Alright, we replaced "fun" (in the title above) with "challenging assignments", which is closer to the language of the article.

I wish your change was reflected in the IEEE article's title. :)

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#88

Post by loco5niner »

eevilspock wrote: post #30
loco5niner wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it would. Example: "Hey boss, why wasn't I assigned to X project?" is something someone more assertive would say.

When women do that they get labeled "bitch".

Foul language aside, I believe it's possible to make my previously mentioned assertion in either an offensive, or a non-offensive manner.

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#89

Post by scythe »

Everybody's criticizing the study but nobody has actually linked to it and the link isn't in the article. What's up with that (and airline food)?

http://m.wox.sagepub.com/content/43/2/178

The thing that really bugs me isn't that they read undergrad students' diaries, it's that they didn't quantify their findings in a way which could be represented in the abstract, which probably means they weren't quantified well at all. As such we're left with scare quotes (like the diary bits in the article) and the researchers' impression of their findings.

This isn't an unfixable limitation -- one wonders, how much room is there for algorithmic natural language processing in the data analysis here?

Re: Are women exiting engineering because men get the challenging assignments?

#90

Post by schwap »

sp332 wrote: post #80
socrates1998 wrote: post #47

I think whenever you are a "minority" in anything you run the risk of being felt left out. If your group comprises only 20% of something, then it is always going to be an issue. The problem with the gender gap is that it will never go away. Prejudice against a race, ethic group, or religion is a mistake. People are generally people and we have more in common than we don't. And as time goes on, I think you will see th…

http://i.imgur.com/reUNxYu.png Other engineering fields are not having this much trouble with it.

Is that the right link? There are no other engineering fields on that graph.
Post reply on HN