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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

#461

Post by dang »

awinder wrote: post #189
traverseda wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the well credentialed seem to be doing more than their fair share of rabble rousing. Also like half or more of social psychology research can't be replicated, so clearly that particular credential is not highly correlated with being correct...

Yep, that’s right. The well informed lead society, not the idiots. If you wanna go back to the dark ages make your point, but mine is that a biology major working for a technology company making commentary on psychology is a slam dunk case of someone who should just shut up. Certainly not someone who should be egged on. BTW: the original comment was based on his job. Google didn’t hire him to make comments like that,…

Your comments in this thread have been breaking several of the site guidelines, especially the ones against flamewars and name-calling in arguments. Users here need to follow the rules, regardless of which views they favor. Please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow those rules if you want to keep commenting here.

Your account also looks like it's tending to use HN primarily for ideology and politics. We don't allow that, because it's destructive of the intellectual curiosity that HN is supposed to be for. I've posted about this a lot, if anyone wants to understand how we apply that rule: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#462

Post by bluthru »

Raphmedia wrote: post #450
bluthru wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link. >Replicating previous findings, women reported higher Big Five Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism scores than men. Isn't this basically what got James Damore fired? Heh.

He worded it in a socially unaware way. If he ranked higher in Agreeableness, he would likely have found a way to communicate the information without getting fired.

>He worded it in a socially unaware way.

I don't think so:

"Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs."

Maybe if women were more agreeable they wouldn't have been so offended.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#463

Post by bluthru »

door2 wrote: post #458
bluthru wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent above me said "Women are socially smarter, so they are aware of that. Men are clueless" and I didn't resort to calling them a misandrist. Let's stick to talking about the issue at hand.

You called women catty. That’s straight up misogyny. I don’t know what else you want me to say.

Describing a gender with a negative adjective is never ok? Is it wrong to call men "clueless"?

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#464

Post by dragonwriter »

mdorazio wrote: post #434
dragonwriter wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Becoming a Nurse Practitioner requires, at a minimum, a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, followed by licensure as an RN, followed by a Master's in a NP specialty, followed by certification as an NP. Practically, it requires more because most NP programs require practice a…

Thanks for the additional information. What about RNs vs. junior devs, which you completely ignored? As far as I know, that profession requires only a bachelor's degree. I'm also trying to figure out what your point in the third paragraph is, exactly. If NPs are geographically distributed roughly equally and software developers are not, you would see exactly that median salary distribution. Again, that's the whole po…

> What about RNs vs. junior devs, which you completely ignored?

I didn't ignore it, I addressed it implicitly with the reasons I rejected the validity of NP to software developer comparison; but to address it explicitly:

The median RN plaisibly makes in the same rough range as the median junior dev (“junior dev” being a seniority level within an occupational rather than a distinct tracked occupation in the BLS data, this is hard to tell with certainty, but plausible.)

OTOH, “junior dev” is the entry level of software development, beyond which people are expected to progress with a few years experience. RN is the full working level in nursing; the median across registered nurses includes a much wider experience band than that across junior devs, so they aren't really comparable: at the experience level of a median RN, a junior dev wouldn't be a junior dev any more.

> I'm also trying to figure out what your point in the third paragraph is, exactly.

You claimed that looking at Chicago rather than national numbers would shown that the latter suffer gross distortion in tech wages due to tech hubs like SF. In fact, the relation between the nursing sub-group you chose to focus on and software devs in Chicago is very similar to the national relationship (both are a little under the national level in Chicago, and software developers a few percentage points moreso than NPs, but not enough to make a significant difference in the relationship.)

> Again, that's the whole point - if you look only at national medians or averages, you're completely ignoring the effects of regional outliers

But I'm not looking at only the national numbers, I just compared them to the numbers for your chosen non-tech-hub locale and found that the gross distortion you claimed in the national numbers, compared to non-tech-hub locale, doesn't exist.

> If you can't do that, look at non-tech cities and countries for an indicator of what unskewed salary comparisons look like between professions.

But I just did that with you selecting both the non-tech-hub city and the non-tech profession, and the national vs. local comparison wasn't materially different. (I suspect that the reason is that locality has only modest effect on the median and a lot bigger effect on the total number of positions and the shape of the high tail; if we were looking at means rather than medians there'd probably be more distortion.)

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#465

Post by rvo »

door2 wrote: post #459
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?

White men get advantaged over nonwhite nonmen in pretty much all aspects of society. “Preferential” treatment towards people other than white men is really just a tiny little correction against the massive social and economic advantages white men experience. How many white men have you ever heard feeling bad because they were only hired for their white maleness (“Culture fit”)? And yet that is the dominant status quo…

So correct racism with more racism ...

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

I guess that means nothing these days.

It scares me when people start talking racially, especially like you. You call me a person of color (basically a new version of colored people). You see race first, content second.

This scares me because it wasn't too long ago that Jews were being thrown under the bus. And it scares me because now you might hate white people, but what if you start hating brown Indians like me (who have the highest family income in America), Asians, or Jews (you probably consider them to be white anyway).

This is just scary stuff man. I wonder how many of my liberals friends view race first.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#466

Post by Raphmedia »

bluthru wrote: post #462
Raphmedia wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He worded it in a socially unaware way. If he ranked higher in Agreeableness, he would likely have found a way to communicate the information without getting fired.

>He worded it in a socially unaware way. I don't think so: "Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance). This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs." Maybe if women were more agreeable they wouldn't have been so offended.

Agreeableness trumps Neuroticism IMHO. Neuroticism is a knee-jerk reaction that you cannot control without a lot of self-control. To expect an individual ranking high in Neuroticism to control themselves is to be blind to other's points of view. In short, it means that you do not have enough sensibility to understand and predict the reaction of others before they happen.

Agreeableness allows you to predict those reaction and plan accordingly.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#467

Post by commandlinefan »

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…

> but what I'm reading here is the subtext

As far as I can tell, the linked article is saying exactly the opposite - that women can be and are perfectly capable as programmers, but that the gender imbalance is probably not driven by exclusionary tactics on the part of the men who make up the majority. It is noteworty that I've never even heard of a woman saying that she actually pursued programming as a profession and found herself excluded - just that the ones who do are surprised how few other women they see.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#468

Post by xyzzyz »

monksy wrote: post #382
ahartmetz wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 5 years is too long especially for tech, and there are things that are and will stay different. Otherwise Germany would be almost exactly like the US now, which it isn't.

For that Germany doesn't really focus on innovation in technology. They tend to like to outsource development to eastern Europe. (That's depressed salaries) Any good developer in Germany is going to silicon valley instead.

No, that's not how it works. Germans outsource labor to eastern Europe, not development. They are hugely innovative, and responsible for lots of advancements in technology, in industrial automation, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, pharmaceutics and more. It's just they are not hugely innovative in JavaScript frameworks, which is what counts for "technology" on HN.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#469

Post by [deleted] »

icefox wrote: post #454
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…

> My own theory, is that CS (programming) is perceived as having low social status. A colleague told me when out at a bar he refrains from telling women that he is a programmer because they suddenly become way more interested because they know how much $$$ programming jobs bring in. That does not sound like low social status signalling to me, but the opposite at least for males.

[deleted]

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#470

Post by nezzle »

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…

This isn't about gender, race, political affiliation, or whatever attribute you use to separate people into 'us' and 'them'.

This is about bullies and assholes. Bullies and assholes come in every race and creed. The thing about male/female chauvinists is that they're actually the same! A male chauvinist, born as a female, would still be a chauvinist. They have everything in common. They're the same asshole bully. They are the enemy.

We need to make a stand against assholes whether they identify with us or not, and stop letting the actions of assholes who identify with us cause us to sit by and tolerate further discrimination and bullying. My 'us' and 'them' is whether you discriminate against people.

Freedom from discrimination is a human right. You don't fix discrimination with discrimination - you only perpetuate it. I'm tired of the assholes running everything.

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