381–390 of 449 posts
what if we started young boys to get interested in gender studies?
Would you please not troll here? If that wasn't your intention, you need to make this comment more substantive and connect the dots to the current topic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>She's showing kids perhaps one of the ugliest and least rewarding facets of being a software engineer and wondering why her daughter... isn't interested. And yet her son is. That seems an important detail. What is the virtue in hiding the "ugly" side of engineering when its generally the most common part of the process?
So you spend your days working arbitrary logic puzzles in a gross language like Python? I know I'd have never gotten into this field. It's so easy to say, "Gosh this confirms our stereotypes!" But even if there are inherently measureable and statistically significant differences that doesn't really translate to "women are worse at programming and math."
>But even if there are inherently measureable and statistically significant differences that doesn't really translate to...
True, but the critical point is that programming is very hard and if you're not the type that's naturally drawn to logic puzzles it could be torture. Interest is related to aptitude in that those that are interested have the inherent motivation to get good at it. I strongly believe that interest is highly correlated with aptitude. That doesn't mean that those uninterested in logic puzzles can't hack it, its just that they have to be very highly motivated to learn. I'm just not sure I see the value in trying to engineer interest at such a young age if it doesn't come naturally.
> in a gross language like Python
Brave words to utter on this site!
> I have told my daughter it isn’t optional to learn coding and that she must stick with it until she’s good at it and then she can choose not to do it This is what I don't understand of society. If someone is bad at something and I think it is important, then I force them to learn it. They will hate it more in the future. All those hours wasted instead of letting her doing what she is good at, and improving that ski…
Absolutely not. I never liked math at school. I was bad at it too. But now it's a major part of my career and I love it. I would never have this opportunity if adults had let me just do what I felt like when I was a child. Children are too young to make decisions for their future. Adults might not always be right but they're better at it than children. That's why school is compulsory, not "if the child feels like goi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you can reasonably assess that your process is fair, I don't think anyone should care how the numbers bear out. Because it goes against the results they wanted to arrive at.
Odd how that Idea never occurred to the person to whom you are replying. In comment after comment, the possibility that there is no bias is considered literally impossible . The blatant and unrecognized bias in this conversation is absolutely fascinating. (I also notice HN has introduced a throttle, presumably to reduce the volume of incorrect messages.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only reason not to do blind hiring is if it produces results which are indistinguishable from standard hiring. Or the fact that it's not really possible. Right now, most software engineering jobs are pretty communication heavy. Almost all company cultures contain a non-trivial amount of verbal communication, so with that premise, it's reasonable to have candidates verbally describe technical things or even make…
> Once you're listening to real voices, Use a voice scrambler.
They found that contrary to their initial hypothesis, women with voices modulated to sound like men were still not getting hired at the same rate as the men masked to sound like women. Not only that, but they found women modulated to sound like men did worse than unmodulated women, and men modulated to sound like women did better than unmodulated men:
http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...
It takes a person with GRE 800 to figure all this blatantly obvious answer.
Now before you downvote me, it is also obvious this diversity topic is especially a problem in Silicon Valley ( Because most people in Silicon Valley are Liberal ? ) and mostly in US.
We dont see this being blow up in huge news anywhere else, the US neighbour Canada, or anywhere else in Europe.
Why is there such a difference? And it seems you aren't even allow to talk about it in US. Where in most places inside EU they will likely have an open discussion without Calling an All Hands meeting off.
Note: Never been to US. So there may be some cultural difference i am not getting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might be right about the work load/work type on average/median/most cases? but I still think there is a difference in social status for the fields/titles. To go slightly off topic, can you speculate as to why is there more gender parity in those fields that are harder to get into (in terms of specific schooling) in the first place?
That's the entire question we're addressing in these threads. It is weird that women excel in: * the rest of STEM, * the law, * medicine, * pretty much all the rest of the professions (accounting, actuary, &c) ... despite the fact that many of those fields are, both intellectually and from the amount of work product expected, more challenging than computer science. Add to that the fact that most software jobs are far…
not the case
Law
At 35%, women practice law at about double the rate they do of more masculine occupations like engineering, while law practice involves abstract reasoning the degree of "social reasoning" is higher than engineering, thus more women I suppose.
medicine,
particularly the more caretaking functions of medicine
accounting
The work of an accountant and a mechanical engineer, or an information security analyst are hardly comparable, not in a hierarchical way necessarily, they just have totally different goals and methods.
Look at the actual data, it fits Damore's thesis to a T. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/03/06/chart-the-perce...
There is a very obvious gradient from people and nurturing oriented fields to abstract, spatial, and mechanical fields.
Women like working with people and caretaking, and are good at these things.
Men like working with things, and abstract and spatial visualization, and are good at these things.
Do you think society would materially improve if we swapped the sex ratio kindergarten teachers with that of engineers?
Kindergarten 97.5% women.
Engineers 85% men.
I see some good points on both sides of the discussion here but one thing occurs to me about the current diversity-pushback that I'm seeing(I'm not going to call it anti-diversity because I think a fair amount of it is well-meaning or at least not explicitly hateful). We've surprisingly quickly moved from periods where it was common to simply refuse to even consider minorities or women in many fields to a time when m…
So, is the identified "gap" really that bad? No, not really, not much reason to think it's bad at all in many cases. Second, and most importantly, not only is the purported cause of big bad mean oppressive bullies lacking almost entirely in evidence, but there are actual explanations with mountains of evidence.
So what? What's the harm if I believe in one cause over another? People use to do raindances!
The harm is that sticking to an explanation of big bad mean oppressive bullies, means that whole classes of people are being not just accused but punished for "crimes" they did not commit. In fact there is no crime at all.
" In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it up for the genuinely amazing women in tech. " Precisely. This goes directly to the core of the issue and what I had brought up on the thread recently about the Google employee who got fired. Specifically, if companies were truly interested in fairness, the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions.…
It's your time and energy if you want to do that, but you should probably recognize you're still treating women differently in that case.
Why do you want to pressure or influence people to do something that all the evidence indicates most of them aren't particularly interested in doing?
Shouldn't we be pleased that in an advanced society people have the opportunity to seek out and perform the work they find interesting and fulfilling?
Some of the reasoning in this post is very weak. It's not very long, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop. My daughter is also more interested in art than my son (who is more interested in video games). Both would make exceptional programmers, and both have a latent interest. Both are setting a course for STEM careers, but, like all 18 and 16 year…
The key point of Damore's memo was that the average members of different groups have different interests and strengths.
This is born out not just in observational studies of the labor market, but also from surveys, and performing personality profiles.
What's with the obsession with with square pegs in round holes, but only for certain classes of squares?
If most people are doing things they have at least some interest in, isn't that a success? Why are so many people running around with their hair on fire, trying to solve a non-existent problem?