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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

#161

Post by walshemj »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #153
walshemj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well making Engineering and Science careers as well rewarded and give them the same social status as say the Law, Medicine are might help. Those young women with triple A's beloved of headline writers come exam time are making a rational decision not to go into a field where they are badly paid.

Engineering and Science careers are quite competitive with law and medicine. That's why these fields aren't filled with male AND female failed lawyers/doctors.

Nope a senior lawyer or doctor gets paid far more on average that an engineer or STEM PHD

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

#162

Post by ejstronge »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #143
ejstronge wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pref…

As I'll reply to the other commenter, it's not sufficient to Control-F to understand an argument. I encourage you to read his article and would look forward to your analysis once you have done this.

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

#163

Post by srtjstjsj »

depressedpanda wrote: post #69

Given a choice, more women than men will go for non-STEM careers, so in rich countries you will find way more STEM-proficient men than women. This has been known for quite some time. But take care not to mention this at workplaces where they use diversity hiring practices to try to artificially and unfairly inflate their percentage of women compared to the field as a whole. It will get you fired.

This argument would be more interesting if we weren't seeing heavy female attrition due sexual harassment unrelated to work content.

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

#164

Post by ejstronge »

throwaway613834 wrote: post #137
ejstronge wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> > On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren’t just socially constructed because... How do you conclude "women are biologically less capable than men to perform certain software-associated tasks " from merely that sentence?

It's not sufficient to Control-F to understand an argument. I encourage you to read his article and would look forward to your analysis once you have done this.

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

#165

Post by caseysoftware »

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[1].

I see nothing there about "capability" but about preferences and about how much the work & teams can/can't be (re)shaped to match those preferences.

We should strive to create conditions where people can be effective in jobs they enjoy as it makes teams, projects, and companies better overall. How responsibilities are divided, teams are formed, and people interact are all variables that should be tweakable to some degree.

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

#166

Post by whataretensors »

bluewave wrote: post #15

The defensive tone of this article is alarming. If you don't study computer science now you will likely be in the same boat 30 years from now with illiterate folks of today. Disparity in computer science education in Western countries puts women at a massive economic disadvantage and is a major geopolitical risk. Arguing that women naturally prefer non-STEM fields is sexist and dangerous. Helping drive up the numbers…

> If you don't study computer science now you will likely be in the same boat 30 years from now

30 years is a long time. I suspect we'll have figured out how to close the semantic gap for the 99.999% of people who aren't programmers.

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

#167

Post by kyleschiller »

overcast wrote: post #44

I'll probably face wrath, and hell's fury for this, but maybe, men and women are different. Has forcing STEM upon the female population, driven any more of them towards the discipline? Taking the sampling size of every woman I've ever went on a date with in my 37 years, none of them were interested in anything related. The vast majority were teachers, psychologists, and nurses. Occupations based around nurturing othe…

Is it possible that your dating pool is subject to sampling bias?

Empirically speaking, about 1/4 of people in STEM are women, so if you've met 0 women interested in STEM, it seems like your experience simply aren't an accurate reflection of reality. [0]

I think it's incredibly ironic that you're highlighting your own relative interest in STEM while failing to apply any degree of scientific rigor to your own thinking.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

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

#168

Post by cm2187 »

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…

There was a whole section on his memo about not reducing a distribution to its average. A difference in distribution will result in different averages or percentiles, however this doesn't mean all women are less capable or interested in a field which is the way I heard most of his detractors characterize his memo.

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

#169

Post by srtjstjsj »

joshuamorton wrote: post #120
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).

Do you know at what age they checked that? I've seen prior research that suggests that the disinterest in stem appears in middle or high school, and isn't statistically significant before then. This would heavily imply some level of social conditioning to be the cause for disinterest.

What people say they like is one thing, but observing proclivities is another. In elementary schools, boys score higher in math and girls score higher in reading comprehension.

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

#170

Post by aspaceman »

coldtea wrote: post #155
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…

> Instead, as a group women have decided that the best way to make themselves more welcome in STEM - is to have more women in STEM. This will slowly correct the negatives by causing more individuals to come into contact with women and have to learn how to behave properly. But these same systemic issues prevent many women who would otherwise enter STEM from doing so. No one is claiming that a perfect 50/50 ratio is al…

> it's the wrong way to achieve that if more women don't really want to go into STEM

This is a good point, which is why my argument rests on the claim that more women will want to go into STEM if they are going to feel more comfortable in those positions.

In my view, it all comes down to why you think women aren't in STEM. Is it because they don't want to do STEM work, or is it because they don't want to be in these spaces? Based on the myriad amount of women who can do work of a similar calibre (in medicine especially), AND the evidence that women used to be not only more welcome in programming, but absolutely DOMINANT in it: I disagree with the former, and subscribe to the latter opinion.

I feel that many think that women don't want to do STEM work because they think of the women who made fun of them in high school or some other such rubbish and use that to infer how all women think about STEM (and tech especially). One's reasoning for not being inclined to do STEM is just as important as them not doing it.

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