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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

#401

Post by jenthoven »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #379
jenthoven wrote: post #244

I’m a CS graduate and female founder. I disagree with many parts of this essay, but I actually agree with this part: “The sex difference in interest in people extends to a more general interest in living things, which would explain why women who are interested in science are much more likely to pursue a career in biology or veterinary medicine than computer science“ I believe that, at age 18, women have more sophisti…

During my career, I’ve noticed many female programmers and even PhD-level researchers switching to PM roles. PM and UX have better representations than developer roles, though I don’t think that this should be counted as success towards the overall problem.

This actually goes to my point - PMing is more social than coding, and there are more female PMs and UX designers so those fields also feel more social for the women in them (easier to make friends, more feminine community).

Re:success - In my eyes, success is when women have better representation as engineers, makers, and technologists. A PM and UX designer could be a great engineer and technologist, although it's hard to keep your technical chops when you're not coding regularly. So I agree...

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#402

Post by scarmig »

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…

So, here's the thing: I think there are lots of good points in everything you wrote here, and yours is the only response to mine that I've upvoted. And I don't even disagree with most of it: I tend toward thinking that the gap is multicausal and that attribution is difficult. "Playing Doom" is exactly the type of thing I mean when I say I think socialization is a major factor in the gap. We could have an interesting back and forth to draw out if and where we disagree.

But my point is that's not the kind of discussion you could have on social media (or, god forbid, ill-advised internally published manifestos) and a not get significant blowback. If I see several friends sharing an article that describes a study effectively showing women are better than men at using Microsoft Word and using that as proof of deep sexism in tech, I'm posed with two choices: I can accurately point out that doesn't make sense as an argument and get people really mad at me for ruining a feel-good social moment, or I can do nothing and roll my eyes internally. Most reasonable people will do the latter, and I don't see how that's a good thing.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#403

Post by mpweiher »

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…

And one thing to remember is that (a) actual random distributions are lumpy, not evenly distributed and (b) there is pretty much no equality of outcome in whatever outcomes or input categories you choose. Anywhere. And very often the distributions in different places also look different (though there do seem to be some patterns).

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#404

Post by leereeves »

mpweiher wrote: post #389
Raphmedia wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I was under the impression that this was a rhetorical question. Of course she doesn't want the community to censor itself. She is describing how such discussions are distressing to women (and not merely to herself, as you seem to state). She gives the example of an aspiring programmer stumbling on HN, noticing all the subtle sexism and giving up STEM. Which is precisely the issue that we should be debating. In…

> while the actual debate should be "what is it in our communities that is driving women away? Why? Women aren't, on the whole, passively "driven away". They actively choose other careers that interest them more. Or why is it that men are "driven away" from veterinary science and early childhood education, while women choose not to go into computer science and mechanical engineering? I find this the most distressing…

Men certainly are driven away from early childhood education.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#405

Post by jenthoven »

bitL wrote: post #228
jenthoven wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My comment was in response to your initial point that "“Many girls decide at around age 12 ... to get a husband that will do all the heavy lifting". I don't think it's because they're "smarter" because in the long run it costs them opportunity, power, wealth, etc that people in the workforce acquire over time. There might be an element related to a partnership at home, but as Sandberg points out in Lean In, this should affect women's decisions in their 30s, not their decisions about their college major when they're 18.

I'm a female founder who majored in CS and left my PM job at Google to start a company, so I have "observed the choices" of many young females considering engineering. It's not enough to say that "women are just choosing the wrong thing" - we need to find the underlying cause of those choices if we want to shift the demographics.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#406

Post by alexandercrohde »

rbehrends wrote: post #350
alexandercrohde wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this doesn't answer my question. What's the ask here? OP suggested this discussion was "incredibly distressing," I'm unclear if anybody is entertaining the notion that a debate among dozens cannot happen because one person wanders in who's distressed by it, or what?

> I'm unclear if anybody is entertaining the notion that a debate among dozens cannot happen because one person wanders in who's distressed by it, or what? The problem is not with having a debate; the problem is the sheer level of hostility present in this thread.

What if we replaced the word "hostility" with "frustration?" Hostility places blame, but I sense frustration all around by people who all think they're standing up for an important cause (and both sides are).

Also, to clarify, I don't think people in this thread are frustrated at/by women. There's no "hostility" there. You may be seeing frustration at a social-justice-movement that they think either A) goes too far or B) debates unfairly by making it "un-pc" to make certain points they consider important to the debate.

If you think having this debate itself is "hostile" to women, well then that's the exact type of behavior that gets interpreted as B above.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#407

Post by Caveman_Coder »

zxxon wrote: post #399
door2 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that’s the problem of sexist and racist white men who can’t believe that a woman or PoC could possibly be here based on merit and always treat them with suspicion. It’s not the fault of people trying to fix the problem.

If someone literally gets hired over some white dude by "virtue" of their gender and/or race, then they aren't there by merit. That's exactly what some ideologically (or PR) driven HR departments do. The suspicion is entirely warranted. The thing is, such practices also damage the self-image of the hire in question. Am I being hired for my abilities, or for being a number in some statistic?

That is exactly what happened with my wife when she was a developer. She only likes coding and solving technical problems, the problem was her entire team was women and promoted this "yay sisterhood" groupthink, even to the point of openly talking about how they hired my wife so they could keep the team devoid of any males...she hated it so much and ended up going to a more technically-inclined and less sexist team before leaving the tech industry for good. She always said the "women-in-tech" groups did more harm than good and thinks its just one big "women/POC-in-tech industry" that unfortunately won't be going away anytime soon since there is now so much money involved.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#408

Post by seba_dos1 »

arkh wrote: post #264
lfischer wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you’re right about programming being so horrible, how is programming any worse than other clerical jobs?

In 4 words: maintenance programming and debugging. Most clerical jobs don't have a lot of surprises hidden in the middle of some undocumented feature. And things are not improving with the multiplication of dependence on SaaS and build and deploy mechanism.

While I can agree with maintenance, I usually find debugging the most exciting part of software development. Problem solving is the essence of this job and I don't really understand what keeps people that hate it in this field.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#409

Post by pseudalopex »

Veelox wrote: post #304
natch wrote: post #9

it’s fine and valid to research whether people encounter improper bias in their careers, which is clearly often the case. But their discussion is incomplete without at least recognition of another possible partial cause of gender disparity in tech, the fact that many sexist anti-STEM cues are given to children at a much earlier stage, way before careers are even on the horizon. These cues are delivered by parents, te…

While this theory makes sense, I find a rather large issue with it. The basis for this argument is that both boys and girls are equally likely at birth to go into a given field. As they grow society gives cues to them that X is for boys and Y is for girls. These cues end up shaping preference and explain the large difference we see in the ratio of boys/girls in X. The issue I have with this theory is that it shouldn'…

Believing that cultural cues are a major factor doesn't mean believing the natural ratio is 50/50.

The current ratio varies widely between STEM fields.

It would be helpful to understand how the culture came to accept women as lawyers and doctors, but why would that be necessary to identify cultural factors as a reason for the imbalance in CS?

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#410

Post by peterwwillis »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #380
peterwwillis wrote: post #369

Why does this article keep conflating gender and sex? As supposed academics, they know there's multiple of both, and they don't always coincide - right?

Humans have male or female genitalia (outside of some rare cases) and gender corresponds to what sex organs you have, no? So there are two of each, right?

No, not really.

Gender corresponds to the societal and cultural difference between the sexes, as opposed to the biological, and is socially constructed [4]. Gender is part of what changes how we act and think, both as normal psychological and behavioral processes, and in more inherent ways as determined by some studies [3]. It commonly is assigned based on sex, but in many cases, some people innately feel that their gender is different than the one assigned to them.

In biological terms, sex may be determined by a number of factors present at birth, including the number and type of sex chromosomes, the type of gonads (ovaries or testicles), the sex hormones, the internal reproductive anatomy (such as the uterus in females), and the external genitalia. People whose characteristics are not either all typically male or all typically female at birth are intersex. [1]

There are many different conditions in which a person's sex organs may not match up with levels of hormones in their body, primary or secondary sex characteristics[2], or someone's internalized gender identity. It's important to note that these are not deformities, but simply conditions that different people are born with. Doctors around the world have for centuries actually been surgically intervening and modifying the sex organs of babies to fit the surgeon's or parents' expectations, which is now considered a human rights violation and widely condemned by the international community [5].

So some people are born with one set of chromosomes, and/or one set of genitalia that may not be typical, yet exhibit some or all of the other characteristics and thoughts of someone with a different set. Their gender may not correspond to their sex, or sex organs.

Hence, it is better to refer to gender differences than sex differences when talking about the roles of people in society. Unless we're specifically talking about making babies, and even then it's not totally simple.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virilization [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation_in_huma... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_assignment#Controversy

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