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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

#211

Post by jlehman »

tptacek wrote: post #141

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 ge…

This is how I see it.

This article presents a thoroughly well-researched scientific study, and presents it in an objective way.

You presented what sounds like an ideologically driven argument. It amounts to “I don’t like that the implications of this study are at odds with how I think the world should be.”

You flagged the article, which had made it to the top of HN, which means that this community wished to discuss it and/or found it valuable, thereby hiding it from view.

I find that reprehensible.

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

#212

Post by dang »

overcast wrote: post #173
kyleschiller wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh brother, there's always that one guy on HN. None of this was supposed to "scientific", so relax. I'm giving you my 37 years of experience dating at least a couple hundred women, that's it.

Please don't be rude, even if someone's reply seemed nitpicky.

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

#213

Post by hrktb »

aspaceman wrote: post #181
throwaway613834 wrote: post #102

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. And what kind of social or career impact on their lives do you expect from such activism against the current flow?

In the United States, political views are a protected class and one can sue if fired on the basis of them. I expect one will claim that James Damore offers evidence of a life being "ruined" by their views, but I think the kid is doing pretty damn well for himself - especially due to his views. If you are a conservative activist in tech then feel free to shout your views from the rooftops, I'm sure there are many on 4…

You can still fire or give interesting projects to someone else for any other reason.

Nobody’s perfect, if you need a decent excuse you’ll find one.

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

#214

Post by dogma1138 »

rayiner wrote: post #208
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…

It’s simple: Get it to 50/50 using affirmative measures, and then see if that ratio sticks.

That isn’t simple at all if women do not want to get into STEM at the same ratio you are either forcing them to chose a career path they do not wish or more likely forcing men into other career paths both of which are destructive like any other the equality of outcome measure.

What complicates this even further is that there are more women in secondary education than man and the ratio is growing men are also considerably more likely to drop out of school than women.

Both men and women have much bigger problems than the so called STEM ratio problem which is also only apparent in engineering and computer science faculties and less so in other science and then pops up again in the PhD figures.

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

#215

Post by ghostcluster »

neaanopri wrote: post #196
ghostcluster wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As to distribution, there are some fundamental biological differences that explain the skew that have been discovered. The largest pertinent difference being aptitude for mechanical reasoning in the general population. > 3233 young and old adolescents representative of the population > For the young adolescents, the observed difference in Mechanical Reasoning is equivalent to 10 IQ points, and this difference increas…

Sure, one standard deviation makes the ratio like 63% to 37%? That's not what we see in tech job ratios, it's worse than that. Everything past that is unjust and deserves effort to rectify

That's just at the mean. It skews even more once you start heading toward the tails, the high end of which you would expect to see in the engineering labor force.

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

#216

Post by Pyxl101 »

mrchicity wrote: post #201
tptacek wrote: post #141

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 ge…

Are men more accepting of high risk, low QOL careers? You don't see many women on oil rigs or driving long-haul trucks, either, even though it can be quite lucrative relative to the skill level required. Software jobs have little in the way of on the job training, "up or out" career progression/compensation, unstable employers, long hours/crunch times/getting called at night, management pressure and constantly changi…

> Are men more accepting of high risk, low QOL careers?

This question has been studied and the answer is yes: men on average show greater interest in high-risk behaviors, and high-risk, demanding careers than women. Here is one study on risk-taking:

> Title: Gender Differences in Risk Taking: A Meta-Analysis

> Abstract: The authors conducted a meta-analysis of 150 studies in which the risk-taking tendencies of male and female participants were compared[]. Results showed that the average effects for 14 out of 16 types of risk taking were significantly larger than 0 (indicating greater risk taking in male participants) and that nearly half of the effects were greater than .20. However, certain topics (e.g., intellectual risk taking and physical skills) produced larger gender differences than others (e.g., smoking). In addition, the authors found that (a) there were significant shifts in the size of the gender gap between successive age levels, and (b) the gender gap seems to be growing smaller over time.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232541633_Gender_Di...

It's also been studied how this difference in risk-taking between men and women affects occupational preferences. For brevity I won't quote it here, but see "Gender differences in financial risk aversion and career choices are affected by testosterone". http://www.pnas.org/content/106/36/15268.full

See also "Women, careers, and work-life preferences". In this publication, Catherine Hakim explores women's work-life preferences in the context of demanding jobs. She notes that some jobs are highly demanding (such as requiring long or irregular work hours, at short notice, or lots of travel) and observes these jobs are inconsistent with the work-life balance desires of women more so than men, explaining why there are fewer women working in these jobs than men:

> The majority of working women seek a large degree of work-life balance (Hakim, 2005), certainly more than men do. Women are more likely to ask for shorter work hours than to ask for higher pay or promotion (Babcock & Laschever, 2003).

https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2011/SPP457/um/23632422/Hakim...

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

#217

Post by ejstronge »

throwaway613834 wrote: post #171
ejstronge wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. Indeed, I have read the article in its entirely before. And I didn't remember such a passage (my memory isn't great), so I went back and Ctrl-F'd to try to find it and still didn't find it. Then I read on in each instance and saw that, just as I remembered,…

> So instead of telling me to RTFA, it would behoove you to just spend 5 seconds pasting the full passage you are concluding this from. It isn't any harder to copy-paste the relevant portion of the passage than to comment about why you're refusing to do so when it actually exists. It's only harder when it doesn't exist.

I'm not sure what you'd like me to do, as I pasted the passages I was referring to in my initial comment. I don't think he's referring to preferences when he says that Google women have higher levels of self-reported anxiety due in part to their innate neuroticism[1].

Fundamentally, my problem with this article is that it makes an enormous leap from psychology studies to innate capabilities to unsuitability for certain types of work. We just don't know enough about each of these areas to make the generalizations that are put forth in the essay.

[1] 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

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

#218

Post by dogma1138 »

kyleschiller wrote: post #160
rayiner wrote: post #151

How do you define which countries have “more gender equality?” It seems like begging the question. My family immigrated from Bangladesh to America. In most ways, obviously, America is a lot more equal. But my mom and her sisters have STEM degrees, and that wasn’t all that unusual for a wealthy Bangladeshi family at the time. Bangladeshis perceive STEM as important, and encourage both girls and boys to pursue it (even…

Yeah, you're absolutely right that by not taking into account things like STEM participating, the metric ignores exactly this kind of thing. Having said that, if you just want to know how it was literally defined here, I found this comment helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408092

Women in the USSR were common in engineering degrees because many other high skill careers like law, medicine, philosophy and politics weren’t open to them.

Bangladesh isn’t that different and rich families send their daughters to get a degree so they would be more appealing to prospective husbands.

You can’t just pick random statistics and extrapolate data from them the fact is still that the more options women have the less they seem to go for specific fields which includes the engineering part of STEM.

People ignore the fact that many many men chose STEM not because they want too but because it’s expectd it’s the default career path for the new blue/white colar worker.

Myself and everyone else I know went into STEM as a career because it was “easy money” the amount of effort required to get into it is actually fairly low when compared to careers like law or medicine and the payout on average is much better.

That said the career for most people in IT isn’t going to be exactly overly satisfying and fulfilling.

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

#219

Post by bobthechef »

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…

You've changed the goalposts.

> No one is claiming that a perfect 50/50 ratio is all we need and then "we're done, pack it up folks". Simply that making efforts to get women into tech is actually a good idea.

Not true. The concern IS over statistical gender bias and the automatic assumption by many on the radical left that if women (no concern about men) do not make up at least 50% of some occupation's workforce, then it MUST be because of sexism or implicit bias or whatever. The problem with that claim is that there is little or no evidence for any of that in today's workforce. Furthermore, there is positive evidence that would explain the differences in terms of sex differences, something that is ideological heresy for the radical left.

The negatives you speak of, what is the evidence that women are leaving because of hostility toward women in STEM fields? If there is evidence[0], why not address the problem instead of using dubious measures like trying to force other women into fields they don't want to enter just so the ones in STEM feel comfortable. This compulsion to get women into these disciplines against their own wishes is not only intrusive and weird. It's using people.

[0] I know of certain types of things women tend to have difficulty with not just in STEM but everywhere, like asking for raises. But that's not hostility nor particular to STEM. Again, that may be something women need to learn to do instead of trying to adapt the world to themselves.

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

#220

Post by TomK32 »

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.

You got this wrong.

First of all, what we choose for our career is depending on many external factors, it can be people putting you off your interest but also someone helping you to learn more about it.

An important fact you're missing here, girls are lost from the STEM pathway in their early teenage years. https://it-online.co.za/2017/03/07/teenage-girls-fall-out-of... Teachers not thinking they could do STEM, parents who have other ideas for their kids (I include boys, if my mom had her way I wouldn't be a programmer) and friends who think STEM is just for stupid nerds.

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