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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

#351

Post by classichasclass »

blub wrote: post #256
qwr23qwer wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe women just see CS for what it is - 'simly not that hard, wiring form fields to databases', and think, let others tap away at the keyboards, I'll be a surgeon or whatever. So, if that were the case, would you say that it's fair to now force these would be neuro surgeons, doctors, lawyers, microbiologists, etc.. to 'wire fields to databases', because in 2018 some people believe that has a somewhat high status in…

A female relative was considering a career change, but even though the salary and perks sounded nice, the work itself seemed meaningless to her. Another friend did make the jump, mostly for the money and career opportunities and she's struggling and feeling a bit demotivated. The CS theory is quite hard, and it's not something she's especially interested in. These anecdotes don't prove anything, but I've been thinkin…

I'm one of those who made the jump from programming to medicine. I consulted during medical school, but programming is much more fun as a hobby than it ever was as a career, and I'm past the bad days where I had sleepless nights and long call. Residency still sucks but even that is getting relatively more humane.

I'd never go back to programming as a career unless medicine became completely untenable, and I doubt that's going to happen at the level I'm at now.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#352

Post by weberc2 »

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…

I agree, but "equality of opportunity" tends to follow "equality", so I think the "equality of opportunity" folks are trying to advance the conversation, but other folks are trying to stop it at "equality" (presumably because elaborating on their idea of the word would expose it to lots of obvious scrutiny).

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#353

Post by belorn »

rayiner wrote: post #65
scarmig wrote: post #26

This reminds me of something I was thinking about earlier today. It's well known that men generally are stagnating economically, while women are catching up. In many metro areas, single women out earn single men. And so I came across this paper[0], which had some interesting research about that. And what struck me was this: there's an explicit assumption that men have worse socio-emotional skills than women, and that…

> starting from the assumption that men are disproportionately represented among the upper levels of spatial and mathematical abstraction skills, there'd be an uproar I’ve mentioned it repeatedly on HN and have never so much as gotten a rise out of anyone. (I should also point out that the SAT folks publish a detailed report on SAT gender differences each year and nobody blinks an eye.) The problem is that it doesn’t…

> That is strong evidence that women are kept out of STEM

I might be boiling down your comment down to that one line, but it such a common line that I feel the need to point out some data. Here in Sweden about 12.5% of the population, men and women, work in a profession where the gender segregation is not higher than 150% dominance for a single gender.

The other 87.5% of the population all work in a profession which is seen as extremely gender segregated. We could describe it as if the wast majority of the population is keeping people who don't gender identify similar to their own out of the work market for which they themselves work in. Evidence that men are kept out of 87.5% of the professions that women work in, evidence that women are kept out of 87.5% of the professions that men work in. In a nation which pride itself on equality, we could claim that there is evidence that the wast majority of everyone here is actively being sexist in their professional life.

When looking at numbers to explain whats going on in society, I feel that the discussion often lack perspective. A ratio of 60:40 is actually within that small minority of 12.5% that is recognized as gender equal, and yet many feel that it too is unacceptable high level of gender segregation.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#354

Post by wrren »

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 not sure what this has to do with the article; it doesn't make any judgements on women's suitability for careers in STEM. Where it does talk about ability, it points out that women are, on average, better at science and maths than men. I think the article is making a similar point to that of Damore's memo; the difference in representation may be explained by a difference in preference. That's not a value judgement of capability.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#355

Post by classichasclass »

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.

My kid sister is a critical care-trauma surgeon. One of her (least) favourite stories when she worked in the South was when she took care of a rather complex ICU case. At the end of it the patient said, "I just want you to know that you were great, but I never saw the doctor once."

My sister is rarely at a loss for words but I'm not sure _she_ even knew what to say to that.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#356

Post by Caveman_Coder »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #343
Caveman_Coder wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Having to spend their free time studying just to keep up with the latest fashion, doing overtime, going through the interview gauntlet every damn time, getting shafted by incompetent business leaders and managers." This is why my wife left the industry to be a full-time mom/homemaker. The problems she solves are more rewarding and the time/energy she spends on things are more worth it according to her. Why would s…

A lot of people would take the opportunity of someone to go to work for them while they spent time in the great outdoors with the kids.

Exactly...my wife struggles with the judgement of her former co-workers/classmates who deride her decision to forgo a career coding for some megacorp...I don't really get why there is such hoopla over going to work and trading your precious time for some money...I get why it is necessary, but not why it is celebrated as a defining thing about a person...a company can easily find someone else who can build/maintain their simple CRUD app, your kid cannot as easily find replacement parents.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#357

Post by chmln »

dmichulke wrote: post #47
scarmig wrote: post #26

This reminds me of something I was thinking about earlier today. It's well known that men generally are stagnating economically, while women are catching up. In many metro areas, single women out earn single men. And so I came across this paper[0], which had some interesting research about that. And what struck me was this: there's an explicit assumption that men have worse socio-emotional skills than women, and that…

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.

> Nazi-related stuff, e.g., try to criticize Israel foreign policy or mass immigration

Yeah, you don't really have free speech if you can't even criticize a domestic policy like immigration.

They convinced you that it is Nazi to oppose the government's stance. Soon you will be Nazi for preferring bacon in your sandwiches or having preferences in dating.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#358

Post by JabavuAdams »

simonsarris wrote: post #287
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…

> One thing all these fields have in common is that they are more intellectually rigorous and harder to succeed in than the computer software industry. Can we rank these fields by day to day... sociability? Or how solitary they are? Say, by the number of coworkers you talk to on a given day for a given number of hours. Or the amount of time you spend not at all speaking, and staring at a screen? Can we approximate th…

I think there's something to the communication angle...

Part of why I like computers is that I can spend my day not talking to these fucking apes that infest this planet -- present company excluded, of course. I say this as someone who's not a social moron, who's recognized as an excellent teacher, and who's actually interested in team-dynamics and debugging miscommunication.

If I'd wanted to be a social worker -- I would have become a social worker. Who let all these social workers into the computer lab?

Anecdata -- dated a kick-ass Data Scientist, and a Molecular Biology Prof recently (separately). Their professional interests were a large part of their attraction to me. As I got to know them, the data scientist confessed that she didn't really like the math and wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't so lucrative. The Prof. was much less interested in biochemistry than in how people relate to science in the context of health care.

So dissapoint.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#359

Post by rvo »

fixermark wrote: post #332
rvo wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Because software engineers consistently become involved in designing, clarifying, and solving the problems themselves, and companies consistently make mistakes that should be avoidable if that had more than zero women or minority staff working on the problem scope and definition. See, for example, "HP doesn't care about black people," the ongoing trend of tech devices that are sized for men's bodies and hands and not…

Ok, framing diversity hires as a way to sell product to other populations at least seems honest. It also explains why diversity hires are also underpaid. But a lot of the discussion around this seems to be about morality and "inclusion" based on people's chromosomes and melanin levels.

Similarly, I know that as an h1b hire, more often than not, I am just cheaper. No, the company is not hiring me because "I am the best in the world". I fear negotiating salary, fear leaving and am a little underpaid compared to the numbers I see on HN.

I hope women don't degrade themselves like we do to feed the massive profits of the big tech companies. I have faith that women are generally way more sensible then us guys and won't put up with this crap. Being a developer can be isolating, depressing and lonely.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#360

Post by door2 »

bluthru wrote: post #348
corpMaverick wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe that, at age 18, women have more sophisticated social lives I think you are on to something. This is really the critical age when the decision happens. Everything else is the just the result of this. My own theory, is that CS (programming) is perceived as having low social status. Women are socially smarter, so they are aware of that. Men are clueless, so they are more likely to choose programming and lat…

>Women are socially smarter What does this mean? Do women talk more? Yes. Is it substantive? Women are more willing to talk about their feelings but they also can be quite indirect compared to a man. Women also have a reputation of being more adversarial and catty: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/opinion/sunday/why-women-...

You’re a misogynist
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