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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

#291

Post by Raphmedia »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #249
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…

I'm unclear if you're asking the community not to have a discussion because you don't want to read it? There's a way to hide posts you don't want to read, I do it all the time with bitcoin articles.

Sexism* is rampant. It is not merely present in threads where the link is about gender studies. You cannot "block it out" like you would any other topic. It is not a "topic of discussion" but an issue lurking behind other topics.

*Sexism has can take many shapes others than direct attacks on women.

Edit: Interesting how this went from +5 to -5 in minutes. Very controversial topic, eh?

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#292

Post by collyw »

kazagistar wrote: post #288
collyw wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Equality" is the sticking point. Equality of opportunity (meritocracy) or equality of outcome (sounds like a nasty place where people are selected on things like race, or gender)?

Equality of opportunity a way of saying "fair treatment by some measures, unfair by others". You are picking which traits inequlaity should happen by and, huh, imagine that, they probably happen to be traits that overall benefit you. "Equality of opportunity" is a phrase I no longer trust, because it obfuscates the true differences in moral ideology. Just be explicit about which factors you think should create unequa…

To be fair when people talk about equality I think very few people think it through this far.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#293

Post by mercutio2 »

vbtemp wrote: post #278
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. I'm so sorry to hear you've had an underwhelming career working on boring projects. There's so much more that's passed you by.

Please don’t make baseless ad hominem attacks.

It wouldn’t matter if you were accurate, it would still be rude and inappropriate, but note that tptacek is about the last person in the world I would describe as having had an underwhelming career working on boring projects (although I’m sure he’s done his share of those, too), so you got your facts wrong on top of everything.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#294

Post by Cthulhu_ »

MistahKoala wrote: post #148
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #94

I'm a PhD student at a UK university. From what I've seen in my department (Engineering) there are about 3 women for every 5 men, both in staff and students, a not unreasonable ratio. However, I struggle to remember more than a couple of women who are British or from an English-speaking country. The majority come from India, China, the rest of Europe, the Middle East etc. I've also seen this in the six years I worked…

Casual lay observer here (i.e., don't treat this as coming from a position of being deeply informed). The phenomenon you describe sounds similar to the 'Nordic gender paradox' (or variations of the term). It's been a while since I last touched on it and I can't easily find a source worth pointing to - at least, one that hasn't been presented through a political lens - and academic names on the subject don't come to m…

What you mention is also referred to in the article itself, and it does make sense - true emancipation and gender equality is IMO more about equal opportunity, and the freedom to choose. The push towards getting more women in STEM and specifically CS feels like it tries to take that freedom away in a sense; you SHOULD pick CS, here's all the money we're investing in getting women to work for us.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#295

Post by Cthulhu_ »

bloak wrote: post #203
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That works much better with "surgeon" instead of "doctor". Lots of doctors are female, but not so many surgeons, at least here in the UK.

I dunno, it threw me off for a bit - "doctor" still has a very male connotation with me. Mind you I've not seen one in forever.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#296

Post by edna314 »

jerf wrote: post #274
edna314 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would equality of outcome in the NBA be a desirable goal? If it wouldn't on average it's reasonable to assume that there is a bias of some sort. You can decide if this bias desirable or not. > Why do we see so few East Asian, Hispanic, and Jewish NBA players? What policy would you create to correct this "injustice?" Because they don't seem to care. If they would care, it is your decision whether you fight with them…

"Because they don't seem to care." I believe we have established in this conversation that people claiming "difference of affinity" are just covering over their biases.

I would disagree. "Difference of affinity" is in my opinion one of the main factors. The real question is where does this difference come from and my best answer to that question would be nudging. And this nudging is exactly addressed by quotas. They are not there to make the numbers look nice.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#297

Post by kazagistar »

pc86 wrote: post #194
collyw wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Equality" is the sticking point. Equality of opportunity (meritocracy) or equality of outcome (sounds like a nasty place where people are selected on things like race, or gender)?

Strict equality of outcome means quotas, and that if the distribution of races, sexes, genders, sexual orientations, etc doesn't exactly match the entire population (or exceed it for certain disenfranchised groups) then something is horribly wrong and needs to be fixed. Very few people are in favor of that. That being said, you can't have a strict equality of opportunity without acknowledging which people didn't have…

Strict equality of opportunity is a pure lottery, which is just as absurd (if not more) as strict equality of outcome. Otherwise, it is claiming that certain factors (maybe, genetics or upbringing or geographic location or whatever else) should contribute to inequality of outcome, while others should not. The whole phrase, therefore, is a thought terminating phrase, allowing a speaker to ignore the nuance of which specific inequalities they belive are just vs not just, and why.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#298

Post by bzbarsky »

jabot wrote: post #223
arkh wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I suspect arkh's point is something like the following (as made in an article I can't locate at the moment, from about 20 years ago):

1) There are multiple fields available for new entrants to the labor force to pick from.

2) Some of these have better working conditions than others.

3) Women tend to be a bit more mature than men at the age at which one picks a career and are more likely to consider working conditions when doing so.

This has nothing to do with whether people are caring that someone is screwing someone else or not per se. What it does mean is that improving working conditions in some fields would likely draw more women in, if the above theory is correct. I have no opinion on the theory itself.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#299

Post by SidiousL »

yorwba wrote: post #248
barry-cotter wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone with vouching powers vouch for SidiousL? He appears to have been shadowbanned for no discernible reason.

The discernible reason was given by dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14882450

I don't know if you're going to see this, but I feel the need to defend myself. Sorry about going on a tangent here, but I have no other way of doing this.

Here's what happened. Somebody posted a link to a PhD thesis in mathematics which was not at all written in the style in which math PhD these are written. Somebody else commented that this is great all math PhD these should be written like that. Then, I pointed out that the author of this thesis (a black woman), wrote a piece on a blog of the American Mathematical Society website saying that all the white male in the math departments in the USA are the problem, she wants them out and they should all resign.

Then various people started down-voting and attacking me. I replied to their attacks and defended myself. This amounted to "ideological war" according to some moderator. Also, since I did not use this account for making lots of comments, it appeared to the moderator that this account was created to primarily to start flamewars. The people who attacked me in a very nasty and personal way did not suffer any consequences since they had more comments hence their accounts looked more legitimate.

So yes, I feel like I've been the victim of an injustice.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#300

Post by collyw »

weeelvil wrote: post #279
aws_ls wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 cod…

I agree with tptacek here. Based on just my experience (contractor then corporate programmer for the last decade), probably 99% of programming work out there in the world is mechanical rote that just involves reading comprehension and the ability to mechanically execute steps in some order. Calling this type of work complex only means someone fucked up somewhere. Certainly there are specializations that are pushing t…

15 years in I have built systems from scratch and done menial janitor work. I don't think its fair to say that that it isn't complex, some shitty work can be really complex due to subtleties and it would take someone with a fair bit of experience to fix. If it was so easy there wouldn't be a shortage of tech workers and our wages would be way lower.
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