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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

#411

Post by bloak »

err4nt wrote: post #305
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In english 'Doctor' is a word that at one time exclusively did refer only to males. A word used for females was 'Doctress' http://doctordoctress.org

That could be relevant. Also the word "actor", with the same ending, is sometimes (by some newspapers, for example) reserved for men.

Sometimes a similar trick anecdote is told about a "German". There's a suspicion that the ending "man" in "German" primes the listener to imagine a man.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#412

Post by pseudalopex »

rvo wrote: post #321
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…

There is the flip side too. I wouldn't want to be known as the diversity hire. I want to be judged on my work and my skills. Not on what chromosomes I carry or what my melenin level is. The more we keep framing things in the context of hiring to meet gender based quotas, the more people will see us as diversity hires. I would hate that more than knowing someone doesn't like me because of my gender because that person…

Who is advocating quotas?

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#413

Post by rayiner »

belorn wrote: post #353
rayiner wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The US is not Sweden. In the US, you die or your kids starve if you don’t have enough money. So when you see a statistic that women have the altitude to go into a high paying career disproportionately to their actual representation, it’s harder to dismiss that just by saying “oh they must prefer to do something else.”

Beyond that, I’m not inclined to believe that Sweden really is more gender equal. It seems based on little more than assumption.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#414

Post by soundwave106 »

naasking wrote: post #384
soundwave106 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim was that what was holding women back from CS was an artificial construct . "Prejudice" is a loaded word for that, in my opinion... in that it often seems to imply malice in what I see sometimes in society as a tribal-oriented congregation on proper "roles", and stereotypes that get associated with professions and cling onto them. The "people / things" role postulate is interesting, it may explain some of th…

> But I don't think it holds up in all cases (50% of chemist bachelor degrees are female ( https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/membership/acs/welcom... ) and chemistry really isn't a "people" oriented discipline IMHO). The article I linked also discusses similar trends in mathematics, ie. ~50% of math bachelors are also for women. Of course, what you can do with a bachelors in math is become a teacher, which is wh…

Unfortunately "oppression" is a big selling popular point these days for ranty-type people across all portions of the "political" spectrum these days. It is easier to think, I suppose, to get angry about Some Malicious Force conspiring against you, rather then examine the often multi-faceted cultural and/or biological constructs behind any sort of divide.

In some cases, there is some genuine concern behind the rant -- some of the stereotypes out there that some people hold are indeed downright oppressive. However, a lot of the times, accusations of malicious oppression are probably overblown, even if there truly is some stereotype out there that is facilitating the divide to some degree. Often the stereotype and prejudice might exist, but more because of social construct, not because of malice.

So angry rants about the situation are probably the least productive way to look into this problem. And yes, as you say, stereotype issues affects all professions. Once we resolve this problems (if we ever do), I agree there is no reason to be concerned about natural drift.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#415

Post by Veelox »

pseudalopex wrote: post #409
Veelox wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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?

It is necessary because the question "What cultural factors cause the imbalance in CS?" presupposes that cultural factors caused the imbalance. The whole point of bringing up that more gender equal countries have larger differences in ratios is to highlight a strong piece of evidence that this is not the case.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#416

Post by bloak »

dominotw wrote: post #335
bloak wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect immigrants to more frequently choose careers that require fewer linguistic skills, such as engineering or music, rather than law or advertising, say. Some of my engineer colleagues are very hard to understand on the phone because of their language. It's hard to imagine them getting anywhere as a lawyer, for example.

> I would expect immigrants to more frequently choose careers that require fewer linguistic skills Thats not correct theory. Visas (h1b) are only granted where there is perceived shortage like computer programmers ect. An indian woman cannot come to "choose" to be an english teacher in usa.

That may be true in the USA but I don't think we were talking about the USA specifically. In the EU we have lots of immigrants who didn't have or need a job-specific visa. Even in the USA, don't you have immigrants who were refugees or family members who are allowed to work?

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#417

Post by alexandercrohde »

jancsika wrote: post #396

> Many academics in the modern world seem obsessed with the sex difference in engagement with science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM) fields. Or rather they are obsessed with the fact that there are more men than women in some of these fields. There is particular concern about the lack of women in prestigious STEM fields, such as Ph.D.-level faculty positions, but surprisingly there is no concern abo…

I think you're making a fair point, that there's a value judgment going on there.

But I also think it's a fair question why gender differences are such a huge focus right now, as compared to say class problems (MOST Americans don't have $500 in savings [1]), or environmental problems (Men's sperm counts have gone down by half in the last 30 years [2]).

Obviously these aren't mutually exclusive, but there is a case to be made that the amount of energy/money going into this problem isn't proportional to its severity.

1. http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/12/pf/americans-lack-of-savings... 2. https://www.npr.org/2017/07/31/539517210/sperm-counts-plumme...

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#418

Post by scarmig »

itsmenotyou wrote: post #378
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…

I think the idea that people are being silenced from discussing the issue honestly is totally disingenuous. I see far more posts from people on HN about not being able to discuss the issue than I do posts actually trying to discuss the issue. I don't think I've ever seen people shut down for expressing reasonable if contentious opinions, yet somehow everyone has this idea that there can't be a reasonable discussion a…

I know for a fact that I, and several other people, remove ourselves from all in-life discussion of this topic because of fear of economic and social repercussions.

Is that not "silencing" (your word) because you think we are irrational and everyone can discuss reasonable points of view without reprisal? Or is it not silencing because we choose to remove ourselves from the conversation?

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#419

Post by rbehrends »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #406
rbehrends wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

> What if we replaced the word "hostility" with "frustration?"

I specifically meant hostility, not frustration; no need to beat about the bush. Frustration expresses itself differently. It's not about standing up for a cause, it's an attempt at aggressively controlling 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.

I had already stated that the problem is not with having the debate, so I'm not sure why you are bringing that up again. The problem is with the form of the debate.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#420

Post by seanmcdirmid »

zxxon wrote: post #391
jenthoven wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, I apologize for generalizing. You're right that Google is an outlier in this way. But I still think that there's a perception that CS is more anti-social than it actually is, and a perception that other professions are more social than they actually are.

In my experience, programmers are generally less socially inept than people would think, while people in most other professions are less socially adept than they think they are. The thing is, some programmers really are socially inept and CS work is one of their last refuges. That includes a bunch of socially inept women, too! Let's not disturb their natural habitat by bringing all these overly social people in, thos…

Software development is an increasingly social job NOT because the people doing it are more social, but out of necessity. Anti-social cowboy programmers just can't produce the results the industry needs at this point it in time. Stories of success like Notch are increasingly rare.
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