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Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

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Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#221

Post by naasking »

tptacek wrote: post #152

Once again: compared to other STEM fields, women participate less in CS than any other field except physics. By double digits percentage more in mathematics PhDs. Statistics is almost 50/50. Several rigorous earth sciences fields --- chem and biochem, for instance --- have 50% or greater female participation. One thing all these fields have in common is that they are more intellectually rigorous and harder to succeed…

> By double digits percentage more in mathematics PhDs. Statistics is almost 50/50. Several rigorous earth sciences fields --- chem and biochem, for instance --- have 50% or greater female participation.

This is very misleading. Female post docs in the maths are below 30%, and computer science post docs are at about 20%:

https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod-wome...

There is no really justification to think that the maths "are doing better" than other STEM fields. It's certainly not a double digit difference.

> Whatever is holding women's participation in our field at or below twenty percent is artificial, and a travesty.

That's pure conjecture. There is very little evidence that this is artificial, and a few good reasons to think it's not. For instance, female participation in STEM in more repressive countries like Iran is at 50%, because it's one of a small number of careers they can choose from.

Pretty much every country in which women have more opportunities to choose from a wider selection of careers shows the exact same gendered STEM trends. Do you really believe these prejudices holding back women from STEM are somehow universal in precisely the same ways across dozens of cultures? And furthermore, that the fields that were even more sexist and old-boys-club, like law and medicine, couldn't keep women out, but a bunch of nerds with keyboards are far too scary for women? That frankly stretches credulity.

A better theory that reasonably explains all of this data is the things-vs-people hypothesis:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#222

Post by aws_ls »

tptacek wrote: post #152

Once again: compared to other STEM fields, women participate less in CS than any other field except physics. By double digits percentage more in mathematics PhDs. Statistics is almost 50/50. Several rigorous earth sciences fields --- chem and biochem, for instance --- have 50% or greater female participation. One thing all these fields have in common is that they are more intellectually rigorous and harder to succeed…

>most of it is just wiring form fields to databases in new and exciting ways

Not commenting on other points, but may be you are looking at it from an angle of an expert who has mastered it, so everything looks trivial. As, clearly its much more than that. It is like building extension for machines - the brains and the controls and also pure information management. That's why projects run into millions of lines of code. And the complexity is still growing, as we have new fields like ML emerging on top of it.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#223

Post by jabot »

arkh wrote: post #195
tptacek wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an essay that knocks down two extrinsic causes for gender disparity in STEM and then suggests, using Finland as an example, that the cause of disparity is probably intrinsic. It may be the case that some intrinsic difference between men an women keeps the field of chemical engineering at 40-60 women/men, or mathematics at 35-65. But those fields are cognitively more demanding than commercial software developm…

Garbage disposal is not what people usually call a cognitively demanding field. The gender imbalance is still worse than CS. What those two have in common are shitty working conditions. Yes, coding is done sitting in climate controlled offices. But it is mostly shit: shit doc, shit managers, shit clients, shit hours, shit tools. Only dumbfucks who don't mind shit conditions for more money would do it. I'm sure if you…

> Garbage disposal is not what people usually call a cognitively demanding field. The gender imbalance is still worse than CS.

Well, it's more physically demanding, isn't it?

But your point is that there are areas where society screws men over, and that nobody cares, right?

So... Why do you raise that point when the topic is how society screws women over?

Wouldn't it be better to improve society? In both places?

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#224

Post by tptacek »

naasking wrote: post #221
tptacek wrote: post #152

Once again: compared to other STEM fields, women participate less in CS than any other field except physics. By double digits percentage more in mathematics PhDs. Statistics is almost 50/50. Several rigorous earth sciences fields --- chem and biochem, for instance --- have 50% or greater female participation. One thing all these fields have in common is that they are more intellectually rigorous and harder to succeed…

> By double digits percentage more in mathematics PhDs. Statistics is almost 50/50. Several rigorous earth sciences fields --- chem and biochem, for instance --- have 50% or greater female participation. This is very misleading. Female post docs in the maths are below 30%, and computer science post docs are at about 20%: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod-wome... There is no really justification…

You just gave me a sequence of data points that confirms my argument, claimed instead that it contradicts it, and then linked to a rambling SlateStarCodex post.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#225

Post by auggierose »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #134
Noos wrote: post #48

What's really annoying about this is that women are not underrepresented in STEM careers! The article mentions if anything, they are overrepresented in the life sciences, and are only underrepresented in math at the doctoral level. The issue is that we are suddenly defining STEM as computer science and engineering only, and that those are apparently the only worthwhile aspects of STEM. The sexism thing and message th…

I don't think it's just Engineering and Maths that have a problem. There's this joke where someone says "A man and his son are in a car crash and they're taken to hospital. The doctor sees the child and goes 'Oh no! It's my son!'". Then they ask you "who is the doctor"? The point is that you are supposed to struggle with the answer because you can't imagine the doctor to be the boy's mother. That there exists an assu…

I don't know, I would immediately think that the doctor is the mother if this question somehow came up in a natural context. But if this question is posed as a quiz, it makes you think, am I not getting something here? Maybe that's why people struggle with the answer.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#226

Post by xeeeeeeeeeeenu »

gambiting wrote: post #160
mantas wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind to give a link for that UK extra tax? I wonder how it's worded :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampon_tax It's just normal VAT, the issue is that many "necessary" products don't have VAT on them, but tampons or pads do, even though they are a biological necessity.

Toilet paper is often taxed too, but of course it doesn't fit the narrative.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#227

Post by traverseda »

dragonwriter wrote: post #219
traverseda wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nursing pays quite well and has a similar gender ratio, in the opposite direction. It's unlikely that's due to two completely different mechanisms, so I'd put more stock in theories that explain both situations.

Per BLS, registered nurses have a $68,450 median salary. [0] Software developers have a $102,280 median salary. [1] [0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/mobile/registered-nurses.... [1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

In san-fran, sure. I'm in Canada (Nova Scotia) and they're pretty similar, with similar levels of respect. It depends a lot on country, but the gender ratio holds pretty steady.

They make 80k, I make at most 80k if I work at the highest-end webdev firms.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#228

Post by bitL »

jenthoven wrote: post #209
bitL wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many girls decide at around age 12 that a better life strategy is for them to get a husband that will do all the heavy lifting. This obviously worked for thousands of years and is likely a result of evolution and specialization. I always admire when I meet an independent woman that rejected this conditioning but it's very rare :( Maybe there should be a better approach to early-teenage girls to help them to make a di…

1. This just begs the question: why are men more ambitious and successful? 2. Clearly, this “decision” that women make when they’re 12 doesn’t effect them in many other fields, including life sciences, law, etc, because they are the majority in those fields.

I think that's a bit biased - some men seem to be more ambitious/successful; the environment is brutal to men to compete with each other, often for scraps. There also seems to be way more men at the bottom of the pyramid, homeless ones, losers of evolutionary selection. Maybe we should start talking about them as well?

As why many girls make that "decision" at around 12 - they might be smarter and see that they don't have to work that much anymore. Maybe in the past when things like cooking for 10 people family or washing clothes/cleaning were super difficult the partners had to form a team; these days most of this is semi-automated and allows different strategies.

Do you really believe that girls aren't making conscious choice to stay away from "weird smelly" engineers in STEM fields that are now popular wrt. $/status but were completely undesirable 20 years ago? Have you grown up completely isolated from young females and couldn't observe what were their choices? Yes, I have seen a lot of men dissing them "just females, can't be good" (I hated it in my idealistic youth), but then later you observe their choices and they aren't doing themselves any favors either, usually picking "safe choices" instead of risky ones needed for success.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#229

Post by naasking »

tptacek wrote: post #224
naasking wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By double digits percentage more in mathematics PhDs. Statistics is almost 50/50. Several rigorous earth sciences fields --- chem and biochem, for instance --- have 50% or greater female participation. This is very misleading. Female post docs in the maths are below 30%, and computer science post docs are at about 20%: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod-wome... There is no really justification…

You just gave me a sequence of data points that confirms my argument, claimed instead that it contradicts it, and then linked to a rambling SlateStarCodex post.

Not really, you claimed double digit differences, which is incorrect as shown by the data.

You claimed widespread prejudice, which has no supporting evidence.

And you may consider the article I linked to be rambling, but it's comprehensive.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#230

Post by [deleted] »

novia wrote: post #192

Hi everyone. I'm a woman with a math degree who just completed a computer programming certificate. I've wanted to study math my whole life, and I wasn't exposed to programming as a field of study until college. I just wanted to state that, for the record, having these sorts of discussions on hacker news is extremely distressing to me. I've worked hard to get the accreditations that I have, and I usually enjoy the thi…

[deleted]
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