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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

#311

Post by Slansitartop »

pc86 wrote: post #210
moduspol wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he insulted about 30% of his co-workers He didn't insult anyone, although some amount of his coworkers did feel insulted. The difference between these two things is significant.

I don't think he intended to insult anyone, but I also don't think it's unreasonable to believe that people could be insulted based on what he said. That's the gray area your binary distillation completely ignores. It's a little more nuanced than "he hurt my feelings!"

That's not a gray area, it's the difference between intent and effect.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#312

Post by davehtaylor »

so33 wrote: post #93
dmichulke wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I often read about these PC-related things in the US (and sometimes Canada). Much less so in Europe, although they start playing catch-up with their new hate speech laws. As a German I can (mostly) speak my mind about men vs women, the only minefield there is IMO (remotely) Nazi-related stuff, e.g., try to criticize Israel foreign policy or mass immigration.

It’s funny. All I hear about in my social circles is people complaining how PC everything is now. It seems like it’s rather PC to complain about political correctness.

And what I've found, is that a vast majority of people lamenting "PC culture" are people who are pissed off that they can't call other people niggers and faggots in everyday conversation.

Replace the phrase "PC" with "common decency", because that's what it is. It's not a list of taboos that are designed to attack WASPs. It's just being a decent person and not being an asshole to everyone around you.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#313

Post by pc86 »

moduspol wrote: post #220
pc86 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he intended to insult anyone, but I also don't think it's unreasonable to believe that people could be insulted based on what he said. That's the gray area your binary distillation completely ignores. It's a little more nuanced than "he hurt my feelings!"

I think what he wrote should be judged on the merits of what it said and not how others choose to misinterpret it. Put differently: We are going down a dark road when someone simply being offended by pretty mainstream views mean those views are the problem.

I'm not saying that the views are a problem because people are offended. I'm saying that since people are offended, it's reasonable to take a step back and ask if the views are offensive, and if the intent was to offend. "He didn't mean to offend" doesn't automatically mean that whatever he said was okay. In this particular case I think it was, but there's nothing wrong with stepping back and asking if the underlying views are okay.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#314

Post by rvo »

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…

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

Seriously? Why does it even matter if women don't want to work in CS? Why do we software "engineers" have the ego to think that we work in some great occupation and it's a "travesty" that women largely don't have any interest in working sitting in front of a computer all day.

We are glorified mechanics. Glorified by ourselves. We mostly build intellectually draining CRUD apps mostly and earn shit wages in super expensive cities like SF. Half of us are indentured servants via the H1b system. I think women are smart that they want absolutely nothing to do with this field.

We really need to get off of our high horses and stop believing we are "changing the world" via JavaScript.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#315

Post by mdorazio »

dragonwriter wrote: post #308
traverseda wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> In san-fran, sure That’s national data for the US, not local for SF.

That's the whole point. Median salary nationally is massively skewed for computer science because salaries in tech centers, where those jobs are clustered, is extremely high. The same is not true for nursing, which is distributed fairly uniformly across the country.

For example, according to Glassdoor, a software dev in Chicago has an average salary of about 82k compared to about 120k for a nurse practitioner. Or if you want to compare earlier career, a junior developer is at about 67k vs. 68k for a registered nurse. You need to bound your statistics geographically to control for skewed labor markets when comparing salaries like this.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#316

Post by Slansitartop »

detaro wrote: post #54
tome wrote: post #52

Does HN have the equivalent of shadow banning for stories? This story is on the second page but has many more votes than front page stories that were posted at the same time.

Flagging affects ranking (quite strongly), which is what I would assume in this case, as do other things like vote-to-comment ratio.

The mods can also manually down-weight and up-weight stories, independent of any user flagging. Some guy did an analysis some months back:

https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-HN.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15507821

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#317

Post by moduspol »

edna314 wrote: post #307
moduspol wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This doesn't answer my question. Is equality of outcome in the NBA a desirable goal or not? If not, why is it one in science or tech fields? > Because they don't seem to care. I'm sure many do. Many women "don't seem to care" that they took nursing jobs while many men took software en…

> This doesn't answer my question. Is equality of outcome in the NBA a desirable goal or not? Sorry I didn't get that you were interested in my personal opinion on that topic. I just tried to tell you what I would find a reasonable approach to answer that question. > I'm sure many do. Many women "don't seem to care" that they took nursing jobs while many men took software engineering jobs. Yeah, seems like many of th…

> Sorry I didn't get that you were interested in my personal opinion on that topic. I just tried to tell you what I would find a reasonable approach to answer that question.

What you're seeing as a "reasonable approach," though, may not be logically consistent.

You asked why equality of outcomes isn't a desirable goal in science and tech. I asked you if it's desirable goal for the NBA but you're not giving me a straight answer.

> Yeah, seems like many of them are still ok with the situation. I'm just saying that it is likely that there will be a problem in the future and its better to fix it now than later.

I'm not sure of this. There are many more female nurses than men and I don't see it as a problem now or even necessarily requiring "fixing."

> Plus, I think you would agree, that this problem is on a social level more relevant than your NBA example.

Of course--that's why I'm driving this wedge. It's more relevant on a social level but not for rational reasons. If you can acknowledge that differences in outcomes are inevitable among individuals and not inherently indicative of a problem (as in the NBA), you'd have to question whether or not differences in outcomes in science / tech are necessarily the result of sexism or even bad.

And that answers your question. If we can acknowledge the end result of individuals freely making their own decisions will not be equal outcomes, then pursuing equal outcomes is not necessarily a desirable goal.

EDIT: Added a necessarily.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#318

Post by pc86 »

kazagistar wrote: post #297
pc86 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sp…

It's just the other side of the same absurdity coin (ooo next ICO?).

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#319

Post by sotojuan »

maratd wrote: post #310
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…

> Whatever is holding women's participation in our field at or below twenty percent is artificial, and a travesty. The overwhelming majority of kindergarten teachers are female (over 97%). Is this a travesty as well? Why can't various fields be dominated by one sex? > is artificial Our entire economy is artificial, so that goes without saying. I think you were insinuating that this is purposeful. It isn't. > Is it st…

> Women are simply more sensitive to work/life balance. For whatever reason, our industry seems to think it's normal to work 12 hours a day.

Most people in tech don't work 12 hours... it is not the norm. Maybe it's a Bay Area or early startup thing, but I never have.

Even if you were right, a lot of other office/"professional" jobs work just as much or longer than us. My friends (female and male) working here in NYC in other industries (finance, marketing, accounting, etc.) usually work 9-10 hours and don't take a lunch break (work while eating). Some careers like nursing are known for their crazy hours.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#320

Post by ZeroGravitas »

pc86 wrote: post #200
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we shouldn't treat equality as a a "war against men". I think we all learned our lesson from the "War against Christmas" when after early victories the Christians somehow caught on to our plan to distribute plain red cups in Starbucks and be considerate of those who celebrate other holidays around the same time. With the element of surprise gone we had no nope of crushing them under our athiest/muslim/jewish/hin…

I can count at least three points in the guidelines[0] this comment violates. > Be civil...Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. (could be multiple but is the same paragraph so assuming combined as 1 point) > Assume good faith. > Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguideline…

Fair point on the snark.

I wasn't however assuming bad faith, I was attempting to use humor to jolt someone out of uncritically adopting what I consider an asburd position (that there is any danger of a metaphorical "war on men", in any sense other than as a talking point).

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