Slatestarcodex in the article cited here multiple times made a point that men didn't push out women out of other high paying fields like law or medicine.
If the theory is right, why did it only happen in IT?
How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
121–130 of 258 posts
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Forced" in the same sense that we say that women are forced to care about their physical appearance. If we had an article claiming that men are being crowded out of the beauty industry, both as workers and customers, I would question the article if it did not take outside influence into account. The alternative theory that women are crowding out men and making it "women's work" would sound exceptional, and require e…
Your premise is supremely flawed. Men actually dominate the beauty industry's top ranks.[1] This perfectly supports the theory that men put up obstacles to women around higher-paying jobs. Also note that the Bloomberg article is well supported. It provides data on changing attitudes as programming became a higher-value profession. It cites studies on programmer psychology. It details the specific discriminatory mecha…
Men only dominate positions that have high income in the beauty industry. Follows directly the predictive model as stated above.
Young women (ages 12-24) out-buy all other age groups when it comes to haircare, skincare, cosmetics, and fragrances (Source: “Junior League” by Kelley Donahue. American Salon , January 2000).
Feel free to provide statistics that men are the majority customer for those products. You assume incorrectly that incentives has no role in how people behave. That is terrible flawed, both as a predictor in how society look like today and as a explanation in how we got there. By ignoring it you are doing anti-science and arguing out of belief. If you are just going to continue then this is a waste of time.
The focus by men on physical appearance, and the focus by women on wealth is a dominating factor in dating. It is the single strongest correlating variable out there (A worth reading are the OkCupid blog on the subject). In a separate survey done in china, over 90% of the women responded that they would not date a man earning less than average income (which eliminate more than half the male population), and a majority of responses thought that men should not be outside when they earn below average income. They should instead be inside working and try become marriageable. That is about as strong social pressure that you can get, similar to how certain countries think about women that are not married.
If you want to present how some mythical barriers to entry shaped the industry rather than plain incentives, then you got to actually bring some data. Not empty theories, but data and experiments that show how barriers to entry is the best explanation to explain gender segregation in the work force. Bloomberg is not attempting to do that, and only present it as their theory with some chosen quotes by a few people in order to support it.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#123It's sad the article starts with the use of the Ada Lovelace trope, she is not widely considered to be the first computer programmer, or maybe on a pop culture way, not in a scholarly way.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haven't read it, but this was the very first hit on Google Scholar: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED509653.pdf Seems like a review with a lot of relevant references.
Hmm...a "report" created by and for an advocacy group. Which links very tenuous studies about performance on tests to interest in tech by...nothing. And of course it doesn't address what I think is the elephant in the room: how can people be so arrogant as to claim that all the women flooding into other fields don't know what they want? "You poor girl, you may think you like early childhood education, but you're delu…
First of all, it's a report written by actual experts on the subject, and one that actually cites more than two sources, not all of them affirming the same point of view. It’s not the Principia, but it’s scholarly work, and a hundredfold better than some rant written by some random guy who has not studied the subject at all, not even as an amateur. But if it’s not to your liking, you’re welcome to go down the list on Google Scholar. If you’re looking for scholarly confirmation of Damore’s views, you’ll have to dig deep. If, however, your intent is to dismiss serious scholarship in a subject you have not studied at all so you don’t have to read it and can continue believing what some dude wrote because it fits with your gut feeling, then there’s really no point to discuss this subject seriously at all.
Second, your question is answered in the vast literature of the field who's scholarly conclusions you so dismiss without study. Just to give you an elevator pitch: the starting point of the discussion isn't tech at all, but the overall position of women. It is a fact disputed by no expert that 1. women have overall far less power in our society than men, and 2. this structure was created by at least centuries of social policy. The only assumption is that women do not want to have less power than men. The discussion about tech is merely an offshoot of that, as now tech is a significant source of power in our society. You can learn the rest if you're interested, but just to make it clear: your presentation of the feminist side is completely and absolutely wrong. Also, while you imagine this arrogance simply because you have not studied the subject, it is an undisputed fact that women have actually been commanded by society for centuries what to do and learn (which, for much of history, was very little). So I wouldn’t start talking about arrogance, because that on the side of men has been pervasive for centuries.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
What am I supposed to see here? (Are you, by any chance, be confusing the word "sexism" with the word "misogyny"?)
You're supposed to see that the media considers it to be malevolently sexist. Redefining the terminology so that "sexism" somehow is a neutral term is, for lack of a better phrase, "not an argument".
I don’t see it. I certainly see many references to it as a bad thing that needs addressing, just like germs are a real and serious problem that needs fighting, but that doesn’t mean that the people who spread germs do it with the intent to cause others harm. So I don’t see “malevolent sexism”, and I don’t see references to Damore as a misogynist.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#126If this is at all accurate, then all it is saying is that programming started as a pink collar ghetto. The article itself indicates it was dominated by women as long as it was considered "glorified clerical work." This is actually really normal stuff, not peculiar to the computer industry. "Serious jobs" tend to get dominated by men. This may be related to "the second shift" -- that women seek jobs that don't take an excess of their energy so they can go home and cook, clean, etc. Men are much more often in a position to say "Woman, get me a beer" and just collapse after giving their all to their job.
I don't know a solution. But, I think we aren't going to find one if we don't first recognize that one of the roots of such problems is not that women are predisposed to certain kinds of labor, but that society as a whole expects women to do "women's work" at home and this is rooted in the reality that women can get pregnant, men cannot. A lot of traditional gender roles grow out of that and a lot of societal expectations grow out of that and it wasn't intended to oppress women. It evolved organically as a way for both adults in a household to contribute meaningfully to making ends meet, raising the kids, etc at a time when birth control was not readily available and yadda.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haven't read it, but this was the very first hit on Google Scholar: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED509653.pdf Seems like a review with a lot of relevant references.
Okay, that's a general study, not a direct refutation of what the Damore memo said.
It does. But an academic literature review by actual experts does require a bit more effort to process than an office memo written in an afternoon by some programmer.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scott Aaronson is not an expert on this matter, either, and, as far as I know, he hasn’t even seriously studied the subject as an amateur. I didn’t say that being conservative negates the argument in the first article (and the second is irrelevant regardless of Alexander’s conservatism); I just pointed it out to note that the publication picked scientists who reflect their views rather than attempted to neutrally pre…
> I just pointed it out to note that the publication picked scientists who reflect their views rather than attempted to neutrally present the current state of affairs in the relevant social scholarship. In stark contrast to liberal publications who never do that. /s
In stark contrast to scholarly treatment, which, even if biased, at least attempts to address different perspectives.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your premise is supremely flawed. Men actually dominate the beauty industry's top ranks.[1] This perfectly supports the theory that men put up obstacles to women around higher-paying jobs. Also note that the Bloomberg article is well supported. It provides data on changing attitudes as programming became a higher-value profession. It cites studies on programmer psychology. It details the specific discriminatory mecha…
Men only dominate positions that have high income in the beauty industry. Follows directly the predictive model as stated above. Young women (ages 12-24) out-buy all other age groups when it comes to haircare, skincare, cosmetics, and fragrances (Source: “Junior League” by Kelley Donahue. American Salon , January 2000). Feel free to provide statistics that men are the majority customer for those products. You assume…
> Men only dominate positions that have high income in the beauty industry. Follows directly the predictive model as stated above.
Nope. There are two predictive models, one that men were "forced" to take higher paying programming jobs, for which you've offered no support, and the other is that they worked to exclude women and recast it as "men's work", which is thoroughly detailed in the article with interviews, studies and specific mechanisms.
You attempted to discount the latter theory by citing the beauty industry, where you said it "would sound exceptional" if women were putting up barriers to men. This assumption is fatally flawed, as it is men who dominate the higher-paying jobs in the beauty industry. Thus it carries no weight as a counterexample, and we are again left to contemplate the total lack of support for your preferred predictive model.
You now seem to have regressed to talking about consumer preferences, a non-sequitur. This in no way contradicts the "men's work" theory, since the work here is running companies, not purchasing their products. You also again claim that no data or experiments have been offered to support the theory, when in fact the article cited data and studies, as I called your attention to. This smacks of willful ignorance.
Finally you state that men face pressure to make money. However you must admit that this does not in any way refute the theory that men place obstacles to women's access to higher-paying jobs. Thus it remains possible that our positions are compatible: that men face greater pressure to earn income, and thus have a strong incentive to exclude women from competition.
Re: How Women Got Crowded Out of the Computing Revolution
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm...a "report" created by and for an advocacy group. Which links very tenuous studies about performance on tests to interest in tech by...nothing. And of course it doesn't address what I think is the elephant in the room: how can people be so arrogant as to claim that all the women flooding into other fields don't know what they want? "You poor girl, you may think you like early childhood education, but you're delu…
First of all, it's a report written by actual experts on the subject, and one that actually cites more than two sources, not all of them affirming the same point of view. It’s not the Principia, but it’s scholarly work, and a hundredfold better than some rant written by some random guy who has not studied the subject at all, not even as an amateur. But if it’s not to your liking, you’re welcome to go down the list on…
I have a question. How come the brouhaha is always about tech jobs but never about bricklaying?
As a corollary, how come it's always okay that there are far more female nurses but immediately sexism when it comes to less females in tech?