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http://i.imgur.com/reUNxYu.png Other engineering fields are not having this much trouble with it.
I think you meant this one - http://i.imgur.com/nzEulzf.png It shows the growth trend as typically being positive for all fields, while computer science is the negative outlier.
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It was a perfectly acceptable answer to justify segregation, too... using "genetics" as a basis for justifying social bias is a very dangerous road to go down unless you're certain you're on extremely firm ground.
> It was a perfectly acceptable answer to justify segregation Actually, no. It was not an acceptable answer to justify segregation.
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People have said exactly what you are saying about every single underrepresented minority in almost any field of human endeavor. Almost every single time history has proven them wrong. Maybe people are right on this one. But I doubt it.
Yeah, that's true, but my point was that gender differences are much more real on an individual level than differences between races. Racial differences are extraordinarily superficial and hard to define. Gender differences by comparison are massive and very real. Again, there is a very real debate on how much is culture and how much is biological. But, it's not ALL culture. The fact is girls and boys are different a…
They've said that women were un-interested or ill suited to be doctors. They are now quite well represented (and might actually become a majority).
Maybe are right about women being un-interested or ill suited to be programmers. But I doubt it.
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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/uncat…
> Lawyers? Male dominated field, especially higher paying/partner fields. [0] That's a relative term. The legal profession is about 50-50 in school and at the associate (1-10 years experience) level. While the partner ranks are still heavily male, about a third of new partners are women.[1] As are a third of federal appellate judges. 20% of Fortune 500 General Counsel/CLOs are women. There is a lot of (justified) han…
>...there were 47,563 law firms serving the U.S. in the year 2000 according to the American Bar Foundation.
(Google result for "how many law firms are in the US")
Associates is the major exception.
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> It was a perfectly acceptable answer to justify segregation Actually, no. It was not an acceptable answer to justify segregation.
I believe the other commenter was saying that at the time people believed it was an acceptable answer, just as now you're saying it's a plausible explanation for this problem.
I am sharing this experience from my job during 2008. We tried to hire our first female engineer. She cleared all the interviews. We gave her a tour of our company and showed her future work location. At the end, she listed down few reasons and declined to join. I don't remember all the reasons she mentioned. Would you like to know what I remember? As I cannot forget this one. She said one of the reasons she can't jo…
From her perspective no other women could signal that all the other women left, or all other women interviewing noticed something bad that she missed.
I am sharing this experience from my job during 2008. We tried to hire our first female engineer. She cleared all the interviews. We gave her a tour of our company and showed her future work location. At the end, she listed down few reasons and declined to join. I don't remember all the reasons she mentioned. Would you like to know what I remember? As I cannot forget this one. She said one of the reasons she can't jo…
That's a fair point, but in an interview she's also assessing you. If she sees no other women working there, then it could be a red flag. From her perspective no other women could signal that all the other women left, or all other women interviewing noticed something bad that she missed.
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> Lawyers? Male dominated field, especially higher paying/partner fields. [0] That's a relative term. The legal profession is about 50-50 in school and at the associate (1-10 years experience) level. While the partner ranks are still heavily male, about a third of new partners are women.[1] As are a third of federal appellate judges. 20% of Fortune 500 General Counsel/CLOs are women. There is a lot of (justified) han…
There is a difference between "DF Alliance firms" and "firms nationwide". I'm not sure there is data on new partners for more than that sub-sect of diversity-focused firms and 121 firms is nothing . I'm in charge of running more firm websites than that...a supermajority of them male or male dominated. >...there were 47,563 law firms serving the U.S. in the year 2000 according to the American Bar Foundation. (Google r…
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Which also means not every study should be used to project its results over an entire population.
You're maybe non familiar with qualitative research methods? A study like this can be used to discover the kinds of challenges that women face in engineering work environments. It would be a mistake to try to make quantitative claims about these results, but no one is doing that here.
I guess I just don't find any of the insights in this article particular compelling or new. We do have a gender problem, but I don't think bs studies like this lend any credibility to the issue.
Before reaching for explanations to reinforce hackneyed oppression tropes, there might be a more economic reason women leave engineering and STEM fields in general. Engineering is about developing skills, and all technical skills have a relatively early inflection point of diminishing marginal returns on effort. Engineering has a high barrier to entry, and women who are in engineering are necessarily in the 80th perc…
I've seen this argument before and it makes no sense. You're basically arguing that smart women recognize that engineering is a bad deal. Why do smart men not recognize the same? You mention kids, but that's basically a concern in any field in the US, because FMLA requirements are a joke. Plus many men in engineering (where parental leave is often much longer than FMLA requirements) take long paternity leave, and man…
Men in engineering on average aren't as smart as they think they are, and given the perceived barriers, mostly it is exceptionally smart women go into engineering.
The underlying problem is that engineering is lower status work than its participants believe it is. Women in it recognize this and switch to roles that provide the benefits of equivalent or greater status for an equivalent or lesser amount of effort.
Sexism does sound more interesting, but reality tends to be less dramatic.