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Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

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Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#31

Post by TheArcane »

js8 wrote: post #12

"If governments want to increase women’s participation in STEM, a more effective strategy might be to target the girls who are clearly being lost from the STEM pathway – those for whom science and maths are their best subjects and who enjoy it but still don’t choose it" I don't understand why we should try to make somebody choose a subject they didn't choose to do.

Maybe to offset effects of intractable factors like female representation in media, traditional careers of older female figures in family etc.

These facetors aren't limited to geographical boundaries and hence could affect the populace of countries with both low and high HDI equally.

Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#32

Post by psyc »

nicolashahn wrote: post #9

I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers, and artificially forcing the distributions towards the middle might do more harm than good.

I seem to recall a certain young engineer who wondered about this publicly not long ago, without concealing his identity. It impacted his career.

Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#34

Post by nicolashahn »

sergiotapia wrote: post #23
nicolashahn wrote: post #9

I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers, and artificially forcing the distributions towards the middle might do more harm than good.

Careful.

Don't worry about me, I don't work for Google.

Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#35

Post by majos »

js8 wrote: post #12

"If governments want to increase women’s participation in STEM, a more effective strategy might be to target the girls who are clearly being lost from the STEM pathway – those for whom science and maths are their best subjects and who enjoy it but still don’t choose it" I don't understand why we should try to make somebody choose a subject they didn't choose to do.

I think the logic here is a nontrivial portion of the women who "fall out of the pipeline" do it for reasons other than lack of enthusiasm for the subject. If indeed there are girls who want to pursue math/cs but run into extrinsic obstacles that put them off, we should try to identify what those obstacles are.

Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#36

Post by sannee »

js8 wrote: post #12

"If governments want to increase women’s participation in STEM, a more effective strategy might be to target the girls who are clearly being lost from the STEM pathway – those for whom science and maths are their best subjects and who enjoy it but still don’t choose it" I don't understand why we should try to make somebody choose a subject they didn't choose to do.

> I don't understand why we should try to make somebody choose a subject they didn't choose to do.

If they didn't choose to do a subject because, for example, they had their high school teacher(s) tell them that he "does not expect female students to do as well as male students" (I have seen that happen few years back when I was still in high school), then it surely is an undertaking worth considering.

Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#37

Post by darawk »

geofft wrote: post #27
nicolashahn wrote: post #9

I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers, and artificially forcing the distributions towards the middle might do more harm than good.

I think it's certainly possible that different career preferences is true and that the current distribution in practice is still skewed. That is, perhaps the "right" distribution is something like 60/40 men/women, in which case both 50/50 men/women and 90/10 men/women would be skewed and pushing people out of careers they'd be happy with.

It is possible. But it's also possible that it's not skewed, or even skewed the other way. It's as though someone should investigate this question before embarking on programs to shift the distribution to arbitrary places.

Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#38

Post by Kenji »

nicolashahn wrote: post #9

I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers, and artificially forcing the distributions towards the middle might do more harm than good.

Oh, really? What a groundbreaking idea! This sounds like heresy.

Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#39

Post by mpweiher »

psyc wrote: post #21
js8 wrote: post #12

"If governments want to increase women’s participation in STEM, a more effective strategy might be to target the girls who are clearly being lost from the STEM pathway – those for whom science and maths are their best subjects and who enjoy it but still don’t choose it" I don't understand why we should try to make somebody choose a subject they didn't choose to do.

The next sentence is: "If we can understand their motivations, then interventions can be designed to help them change their minds." I imagine there is a non-coercive way to try to understand the reasons, and use that to inform counseling of students.

This is so incredibly condescending. People need "counseling" because they don't choose what you think they should choose?

How about just respecting people's choices??

Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#40

Post by kazinator »

trendia wrote: post #25
NegativeLatency wrote: post #2

Never forget: causation does not necessarily imply correlation

Totally irrelevant to this article, but you are technically correct. Let X = "angle" Let Y = sin(X) Then X has a causal relationship with Y, but Corr(X, Y) = 0. I doubt that's what you're saying, though!

However, small deltas around a particular X correlate with corresponding small sigmas around the corresponding Y.
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