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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

#121

Post by asyncanup »

tajen wrote: post #76
aspaceman wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As expected, this is the top comment on an article practically built for this argument. It may very well be that men and women have different criteria, but that is completely irrelevant, and I find this line of argumentation very frustrating as it completely ignores the actual complaints at hand. Women in STEM complain that they have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions. Many women feel they a…

Men have massive school problems and the one field we’re focusing on is STEM. Please everyone, look at the chart of men/female ratio at university since 1980 (hint: men are a minority at uni, hitting 1/3 in the nect years) and explain me why, for $1 spent on females in STEM, we don’t spend $10 on males at university? Men are systematically forgotten in every single « equality » program. Case in point : > Women in STE…

yeah, why don't you?

- man

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

#122

Post by throwaway613834 »

ejstronge wrote: post #90
Idontknowmyuser wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what did he say worse than that?

His argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks[1]. I could find more questionable positions but have attached a copy of the memo below. Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things. We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how peo…

> His argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks

Could you please point to the exact sentence that says this? Because I did a quick search for "biolog" and I did not find a single passage that proposed what you wrote. What I did ̶s̶a̶y̶ find is sentences like "women are generally more cooperative and agreeable than men" which say nothing about women being less capable of performing any software-associated tasks.

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

#123

Post by randyrand »

aspaceman wrote: post #56
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.

As expected, this is the top comment on an article practically built for this argument. It may very well be that men and women have different criteria, but that is completely irrelevant, and I find this line of argumentation very frustrating as it completely ignores the actual complaints at hand. Women in STEM complain that they have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions. Many women feel they a…

Perhaps most that feel because society tells them to.

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

#124

Post by lulmerchant »

geofft wrote: post #82
lulmerchant wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This data entirely negates that claim. In countries with the highest levels of gender equality, where women are least likely to experience any of these negative forces, they simply self-select not to participate in certain fields (on average). If you cannot participate in a field where not enough of the people look and act like you, then perhaps you have the problem.

> In countries with the highest levels of gender equality, where women are least likely to experience any of these negative forces The data does not support correlating those two. "Gender equality" in this report refers to the factors in Table 1 at http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2016/mea... , which is about things like life expectancy and number of female politicians and salary - not about disres…

Of course it does. Feminism is ingrained into the cultures of these countries. The data overwhelmingly shows that when you give men and women equal opportunities and the freedom to make their own choices, that men and women, on average, make different choices.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. Apart from those who buy into the world view that the only two groups in any society are the oppressed and their oppressors, which is clearly just toxic bullshit.

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

#125

Post by rtz12 »

Countries with more gender equality are richer. Countries with less gender equality are poorer. In poorer countries, you are more inclined to choose careers based on paycheck, less on personal preference. In richer countries you are more inclined to choose careers based on your personal preferences and less on for the paycheck.

It's pretty easy.

EDIT: A good counter example to this correlation could be Japan. Low gender equality but also low female participation in STEM fields.

Why? Because Japan is a rich country.

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

#126

Post by cm2187 »

OtterCoder wrote: post #96
aspaceman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If you feel differently, and you are a woman then I highly encourage you to become more involved with activism because that is the only way to make your voice and opinions heard. It is not fair that all womens' positions have been decided by activists, and many women in tech have specifically noted this issue. However, activism is available for any individual interested in it.

You miss the point that a satisfied person has little incentive for activism. Also, most conservative opinions tend to be met with anything from disgust to derision online, further disincentivizing counter-protest.

or dismissal.

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

#127

Post by jacobsheehy »

OtterCoder wrote: post #96
aspaceman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If you feel differently, and you are a woman then I highly encourage you to become more involved with activism because that is the only way to make your voice and opinions heard. It is not fair that all womens' positions have been decided by activists, and many women in tech have specifically noted this issue. However, activism is available for any individual interested in it.

You miss the point that a satisfied person has little incentive for activism. Also, most conservative opinions tend to be met with anything from disgust to derision online, further disincentivizing counter-protest.

> You miss the point that a satisfied person has little incentive for activism.

This is interesting - what do you mean by this? I'm not sure what you mean in this context, but in an overall, general sense I strongly disagree.

Certainly there is significant incentive for activism from a satisfied person. A person may be satisfied but that does not mean that there is not room for improvement or change. Satisfaction is something that is static, stagnant, and doesn't last forever. One day you may be satisfied with a product or political situation, and the next day you might not be even if it remains unchanged itself.

Activism is a method of creating change. Everyone is incentivized by it because everyone can benefit immensely from change, even the ultra-rich.

> Also, most conservative opinions tend to be met with anything from disgust to derision online, further disincentivizing counter-protest.

I have found the opposite to be true, actually. Depending on the online community, sometimes it is the conservative opinions that are the only ones deemed acceptable by the community (as is often the case here on HN), and in others perhaps the liberal comments.

But I have been a liberal commenter on the internet for nearly 20 years and I have found, time and time again, that the internet has little room for acceptance of left-wing opinions.

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

#128

Post by geofft »

jhall1468 wrote: post #113
geofft wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In countries with the highest levels of gender equality, where women are least likely to experience any of these negative forces The data does not support correlating those two. "Gender equality" in this report refers to the factors in Table 1 at http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2016/mea... , which is about things like life expectancy and number of female politicians and salary - not about disres…

> not about disrespect, unrightful criticism, and scrutiny in technical fields on the basis of sex. Well since these are claims you can undoubted produce data that all of these issues are significant across the entire field?

Sure, give me a research lab and some funding. I don't know that there have been many rigorous studies across all of STEM that measure this effect and give an answer one way or another.

For tech in particular, see the Kapor Center's report: https://www.kaporcenter.org/tech-leavers/ (which, it should be noted, reports on people who have left tech: the percentages in that report should not be read as the fraction of people in tech who decide to leave).

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

#129

Post by rbehrends »

I can't help but think that the article/paper are overstating a statistical effect here by attempting to reduce a multicausal phenomenon to a monocausal one.

If you look just at rich western countries, most of them occupy a fairly narrow strip on the graph. There are outliers, but they can go either way; Finland has a very low STEM graduation rate for women, Denmark a very high one (Figure 3b in the paper). Austria and Germany have fairly different outcomes, despite being culturally more similar than other countries that differ less.

This is sort of obscured by throwing in many countries that honestly have very different cultures, very different academic systems, and different constraints for people of different genders that seem to be difficult to reduce to just a single number.

For a simple example, there are countries where nursing is primarily taught at colleges and others where nursing is primarily taught through vocational programs. Given the gender disparity in nursing, that would affect the gender breakdown for STEM graduation rates (depending on whether you count nursing as part of the "M" in STEM or not, one way or the other).

I'm honestly surprised that for most affluent western countries the numbers are not more spread out. If I had to guess – and we really have too few data points for that – I'd say we're simply looking at a normal distribution here, especially as (with the exception of the UK) the larger countries tend to be closer to the midpoint of the 20%-30% range and it's smaller countries that are at the fringes of the range.

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

#130

Post by throwaway613834 »

psyc wrote: post #101
interfixus wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now lawsuits concern themselves with what a man really thinks ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

Something I've wondered: how is this reconciled with the notion of "ignorance of the law isn't a defense"? If you do something that's a crime but have no idea that it's a crime (and had no intention to commit one) then you can generally still get convicted because that's not a defense, right? So where does the guilty mind come into play?
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