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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

#421

Post by weberc2 »

rayiner wrote: post #72
psyc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lest we forget, it isn't only charismatically-challenged unfortunates like Damore who get thrown under a tank for daring to speak 'out of turn' wrt the social justice narrative. Just two hours ago, I happened to re-read the various vicious hit pieces written about Paul Graham several years ago, after he had the gall to speak his mind about representation. These are the times. Everywhere I look online, it's men vs. wo…

Damore’s screed was also rife with fallacies and unsupported generalizations, let’s not forget that. It drives me nuts that his lack of “charisma” (rather than his lack of logical reasoning skills or writing ability) is what people are saying got him fired. If he’d written a manifesto that sloppy on a technical topic people would’ve ripped him to shreds.

However bad his reasoning was, the position he's criticizing ("disparity, thus oppression") is far less reasonable, and heads don't roll for it. In fact, it's the official view. Besides, one instance of bad reasoning does not merit termination. I really don't see how anyone can honestly bring himself to believe that Damore was fired for anything other than political heresy.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#422

Post by sannee »

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…

> Once again: compared to other STEM fields, women participate less in CS than any other field except physics.

Hm, are these US statistics? Cursory look at our electrical engineering (european post-communist country) study programme list of students reveals that out of ~50 students, there is exactly zero women (:(). There is decidedly more women in the CS programme (~14%)

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#424

Post by oh_sigh »

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 wonder if the 'men have worse socio-emotional skills' idea can at least partially explain the male/female divide in CS? Right now we take men as the baseline, and say that women are underrepresented. But what if it is men that are over represented, because for whatever reason they are drawn to computers(more so than women) because of some lacking social skill?

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#425

Post by bitL »

jenthoven wrote: post #405
bitL wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shou…

Couple of points:

- I can't take Sheryl seriously; she's not a prototype of a woman that risks a lot to achieve success and her dating advices IMO just poison the well to most regular women, as not many men contemplating serious relationship want to have anything with women following her advices

- from my personal experience of running multiple companies, I once offered significant equity in an e-commerce startup to a woman as one of two founders. Her reaction was that once the company nets $1M, I can give her 50% stake. This risk aversion is the norm. I have only one counter-example of a female CFO that was driven to succeed against all odds.

- young males are now seriously disadvantaged; they have to be like 50% better than females to even get to interview stage in most lucrative tech companies. This is obviously not sustainable nor fair and a backlash is mounting. Either they completely drop out of society, or become associated with extremist male-only movements. This is very troubling and a waste of potential.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#426

Post by rvo »

Caveman_Coder wrote: post #407
zxxon wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Yea, I saw the women in machine learning group at NIPS and was really wondering if this is a good thing or not.

Now they are considering Black in Machine Learning too (or something like that).

This all just seems sexist and racist. Mathematics and statistics shouldn't be conditioned on race and gender! What's next, there are too many Jews who win the Nobel prize?? Doesn't this type of thinking remind people of the horrible past?

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#427

Post by weberc2 »

pc86 wrote: post #313
moduspol wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Given that the media and all of Damore's other critics have to overtly lie about the contents of the memo in order to cast it as "offensive", I think it's abundantly clear that the memo itself is innocuous.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#428

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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…

The problem with that alternative explanation which is also offered by the article above is that in the very big part of the world that lies outside of Silicon Valley, the top salaries are accessible not through the technical career paths, but though the managerial ones. So anyone who's just looking for the highest paid job would not go for a technical career. [1]

What this tells us is the opposite of what the article concludes. If women in more equal countries, with an absent "glass ceiling" that keeps them from attaining the top-paying positions, choose non-technical careers, that is because (they expect that) those careers pay better than technical careers.

This choice however, does not allow us to conclude a lack of interest in technical subjects. It merely suggests an interest in a better paid job.

Note that we also can't conclude that women in less equal countries are more interested in technical positions. However, this is not what I'm claiming. My point is that it's not safe to infer "interest in X" fom "works in X".

P.S. I see below you say you didn't read the article. It basically says what you say in your comment.

_______________

[1] This comes from my personal experience, but I don't expect it to be controversial. In many companies I've worked, men and women, even if they started out as technical workers, jumped on to a managerial track as soon as they got the chance. In one particular multinational financial company I worked, this was so common that the company had very few technical employees and had to outsource most of its technical work to contractors- which should also not come as any news to anyone who's worked in the financial sector.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#429

Post by pron »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #397
pron wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, why are they less interested? Second, like I said, the problem is an overall unfair distribution of power. I find it very hard to believe that women are so uninterested in all professions that confer power to the point that they're willing to give up power (and therefore freedom) to not practice them.

I've worked in the finance industry and the tech industry, both industries where women are underrepresented. These industries would love to employ more women. When I worked in finance the recruiters spent a ton of effort trying to get women to apply, but they couldn't get anywhere close to 50/50 in terms of number of applicants. Maybe women (on average, not outliers obviously) value other things more than power? At l…

But the whole point of almost every kind activism is to change what has so far been called the traditional way of life -- from the struggle of the plebeians and patricians in ancient Rome, through the French Revolution and abolition to women's suffrage and desegregation (and even, you could say, that of vegetarians) -- because the traditional way of life distributes power unequally (that's an objective fact) and unfairly (that's a subjective opinion). It's fine to say that you think that the current distribution of power should remain (because you think that this unequal distribution is fair for some other reasons or because equality of power among large groups of people is not one of your values) -- that's what conservatism is about -- but it's not fine to deny it or claim that those who want to change the current distribution of power are "obsessed". The tactic of claiming that the marginalized don't even really want their share of power is also an old and ultimately unsuccessful one. The argument that we want more women but they aren't there is also weak, just as saying "we want rich and educated black land-owners to run local farming associations but there aren't any" during the reconstruction would have been. Social change occurs as a result of activism; it's a slow process and one that always meets plenty of opposition.

The real argument is this: do you think that women should (meaning that it is our priority as a society to make that happen, and that means changing things) have equal power or not?

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#430

Post by pwinnski »

I read "obsessed" and "surprisingly" (for something which surprises me exactly zero) and "intimidating" and I keep reading, even though literally the first sentence has revealed a pretty strong bias. Then I read that "there should be gender equity" is "an extreme agenda," and I finally roll my eyes.

I did keep reading, and I find that I do agree somewhat with their conclusion, but I wonder if they're aware of how ridiculous their framing is.

Of the many points I found objectionable, I'll focus on only one, the most egregious silliness:

It is neither "surprising" nor "curious" that "there is no concern about the under-representation of women in lower-level technical jobs, such as car mechanics or plumbing." Two paragraphs later they go on to spell out why it should be completely unsurprising: "the different numbers of men and women in these fields contribute, in part, to the sex difference in earnings."

If there's a problem with both A and B, and B generally pays 10x what A pays, I'm going to focus on the problem with B.

Duh.

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