Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by tptacek » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 8:32 PM UTC

This is on the front page of Hacker News because people here believe it bolsters arguments about the underlying fairness of our field, in which women make up something like 20% of the workforce.

The article does not accomplish that. Despite an overall trend in STEM throughout the western world for greater male participation than female, computer science is uniquely low; it is rivaled only by physics and MechE for gender disparity.

Throughout the rest of STEM, including hard fields like chemistry and mathematics, we see significantly improved participation among women. There are a bunch of STEM fields that have near parity, and a few (molecular biology, for instance) in which there are slightly more women. These are PhD numbers, not premed stats.

Besides better gender parity, something all these fields have in common at the graduate level is that they are significantly more demanding than commercial computer science. We kid ourselves that our day-to-day work is so rarefied that we need the top of the intelligence curve, so much so that the supposed variance in intelligence between men and women might explain our staffing. That's ridiculous. We do a bog-standard symbol manipulation job, and, even at the elite level, we tend to do it slap-dash and ad-hoc.

Whatever is keeping women to 20% of our field is artificial, and a travesty.

It's also on the front page, I believe, because it's a cite followed from an article posted earlier this week making some of the same arguments. That post had a huge discussion, making this a needless duplicate. We don't need to keep re-litigating this on the front page of the site. I flagged it.

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

#142

Post by eecc » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 8:32 PM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #39

psyc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ??

You’re turning it around, this is not about disrespecting personal choice, but rather to identify conditioning factors that effectively force out women that would have otherwise taken that path.

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

#143

Post by Pyxl101 » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 8:33 PM UTC

ejstronge wrote: post #131

throwaway613834 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wome…

> 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 say 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. From his article: On average, men and women biologically dif…

> [Damore's] argument proposed that women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks

The line and paragraph that quoted above makes no judgments about the capability of men or women for software tasks or otherwise, as far as I can tell. (Edit: I’ve read the whole memo at least twice)

The statements that men and women differ biologically, and that this impacts occupational preferences, is not scientifically novel or controversial. Writing about Damore's memo in Quilette, Deborah Soh (PhD in sexual neuroscience) said:

> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.

http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

Another other article by Koh goes into more detail about the specific scientific research into this topic, and includes links to several original research publications (so you don't need to take her word for it): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manife...

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

#144

Post by dahart » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 8:33 PM UTC

> Girls, even with their ability in science equalled or excelled that of boys, were often likely to be better overall in reading comprehensions, which relates to higher ability in non-STEM subjects.

Why is reading comprehension non-STEM?

I've read that success in STEM graduate degrees is highly predicted by language scores on the GRE, and not well predicted by the math part of the test at all.

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

#145

Post by srtjstjsj » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 8:33 PM UTC

mpweiher wrote: post #39

psyc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ??

Take a women who is a talented programmer and enjoys programmer, but chooses not to work as a programmer because she is sick of constant sexual harassment. Should we respect her choices or design interventions?

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

#146

Post by skocznymroczny » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 8:33 PM UTC

Mikeb85 wrote: post #5

> Girls also tended to register a lower interest in science subjects. These differences were near-universal across all the countries and regions studied. So girls are less interested in these subjects, but in more unequal countries (read poorer) they do it for career prospects, while in more equal countries (read richer) they do what they want (not STEM subjects).

Well, if they don't want to pursue STEM careers, perhaps we should respect their decisions? Meanwhile most big American companies are bent on having a 50/50 ratio in all job types on all levels.

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

#147

Post by neaanopri » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 8:33 PM UTC

lulmerchant wrote: post #64

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…

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.

Or if you cannot allow a minority to participate in your field without becoming hostile to them, maybe the problem isn't with the minority?

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

#148

Post by DoreenMichele » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 8:33 PM UTC

pacala wrote: post #63

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…

> as a group women have decided that the best way to make themselves more welcome in STEM I missed when the voting took place. You mean a group of activist women (and men) assumed to talk on behalf of all women in the field?

I think it lacks nuance and can very well be mishandled as an agenda, but the reality is that simply having more women in a particular setting can help make the atmosphere more welcoming of them. (Or people of color. Or long haired hippies. Or whatever group you would like to see more of.)

I really think it matters how we get there and most people advocating for it seem to think that piece does not matter, so I certainly have sympathy for the skepticism with which the idea gets met. But observation of actual reality pretty strongly bear's out the idea that if you can succeed in passing a certain threshold, it will tend be self perpetuating beyond that.

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

#149

Post by geofft » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 8:34 PM UTC

lulmerchant wrote: post #124

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…

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…

> Feminism is ingrained into the cultures of these countries.

Given that the leader of the free world has said that he's not a feminist, I'm not sure I would say that it's ingrained into the culture. It's a recent cultural phenomenon of these countries, sure. But Western civilization has a much deeper culture of patrilineal succession, of the priesthood being restricted to men, of only men having political representation, of the father being the head of the household, etc. That stuff doesn't evaporate from a culture quickly, and even today many of those are strongly believed by huge parts of Western civilization.

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

#150

Post by greentuna » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 8:34 PM UTC

One thing I have noticed is that male engineers are intrinsically motivated but female engineers, even highly capable ones, are extrinsically motivated.

So you find very few female engineers in open source projects, under 3% by some estimates, although the percentage of female professional software engineers is much higher. Clearly this is not due to discrimination —- github doesn’t ask you your gender. So there must be some other explanation. When someone is intrinsically motivated (i.e., not motivated by salary alone) they are likely to be a better employee.