Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

thejournal.ie

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 310 posts

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

#261

Post by chillee »

mbo wrote: post #253
mpweiher wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> uniquely low; it is rivaled only by physics and MechE for gender disparity. So it is not, in fact, "uniquely" low. It is about the same as other engineering. Hmm...maybe because it is like other engineering? > Whatever is keeping women to 20% of our field is artificial, and a travesty. You claim without a shred of evidence, while poo-pooing the actual evidence to the contrary. It is a simple fact that most people r…

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when... I mean, it looks like an artificial phenomenon.

I've always thought it's because early computing was very similar to data entry/accounting.

http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-...

> Rather, managers hired women because they expected programming to be a low-skill clerical function, akin to filing, typing, or telephone switching. Assuming that the real “brain work” in electronic computing would be limited to the hardware side, managers reserved these tasks for male engineers.

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

#262

Post by lowry »

dogma1138 wrote: post #218
kyleschiller wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bullshit right in the first paragraph. Women snipers, women tank drivers, women pilots were not uncommon in USSR during the second world war. Half of the lawyers were women in USSR by 1980, although the comparison to US would be meaningless, the legal profession there is pretty different. Politics and philosophy... Peuh. These are not professions even in US.

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

#263

Post by [deleted] »

dkoubsky wrote: post #260
Pyxl101 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's explore some other possible theories for the gender ratio of doctors and nurses. What if it was the case that men more than women are attracted to the most demanding jobs? And women more than men favor family-friendly hours and work life-balance? If that was the case, then it could explain why men more than women become doctors, and women nurses: because becoming a doctor is significantly more demanding than be…

I've heard this phrased in another way. The question isn't why many women seek more balance, it's why some men are insane enough to want to work such intense hours.

[deleted]

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

#264

Post by naasking »

chillee wrote: post #261
mbo wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when... I mean, it looks like an artificial phenomenon.

I've always thought it's because early computing was very similar to data entry/accounting. http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-... > Rather, managers hired women because they expected programming to be a low-skill clerical function, akin to filing, typing, or telephone switching. Assuming that the real “brain work” in electronic computing would be limited to the hardware side, managers reserv…

That's exactly right. Male engagement in computer science and programming sky rocketed with the Advent of personal computers, while female engagement didn't change much.

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

#265

Post by naasking »

mbo wrote: post #252
depressedpanda wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. So, basically you're saying that the more technical a field is, the less women will be inclined to pursue a career in it? Aside from your tiresome bias coming from obvious ideology, I actually agree with you.

What makes MechE, CS and physics more "technical" than other STEM sub-fields?

Other fields, like chemistry and mathematics have transferable knowledge to, for example, pharmacology and teaching, respectively. This isn't so much the case with the fields that still feature low engagement among women.

The people vs. things hypothesis has pretty robust data supporting it at this point.

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

#266

Post by naasking »

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…

> Bangladeshis perceive STEM as important, and encourage both girls and boys to pursue it (even if they don’t expect girls to stay in the work force after they get married).

That could be a critical factor. The other factor that I've heard posited is that career opportunities for women are limited in less liberal countries, so they take what they can get. This would be why Iran has gender parity in computer science, for instance.

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

#267

Post by friedButter »

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…

> but maybe, men and women are different

Umm.. even US courts have disagreed with you in the James Damore case, saying that Google was right to fire him for suggesting this... I agree with you, however when the govt, judiciary and private employers agree that "men and women are the same, except when difference benefits women", there isnt a lot that can be done

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

#268

Post by rayiner »

naasking wrote: post #266
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…

> Bangladeshis perceive STEM as important, and encourage both girls and boys to pursue it (even if they don’t expect girls to stay in the work force after they get married). That could be a critical factor. The other factor that I've heard posited is that career opportunities for women are limited in less liberal countries, so they take what they can get. This would be why Iran has gender parity in computer science,…

In Iran, women make up 70% of science and engineering majors, as well as 70% of medical students. These are not low status professions in Iran (Ahmadinejad was an engineer). So what professions are they being excluded from that they would prefer that they go into science and engineering instead?

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

#269

Post by GhostVII »

mbo wrote: post #253
mpweiher wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> uniquely low; it is rivaled only by physics and MechE for gender disparity. So it is not, in fact, "uniquely" low. It is about the same as other engineering. Hmm...maybe because it is like other engineering? > Whatever is keeping women to 20% of our field is artificial, and a travesty. You claim without a shred of evidence, while poo-pooing the actual evidence to the contrary. It is a simple fact that most people r…

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when... I mean, it looks like an artificial phenomenon.

The drop in women in computer science seems to follow the rise of home computers in the 1980s, which, as far as I know, were more popular among men/boys.

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

#270

Post by geofft »

depressedpanda wrote: post #248
geofft wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's true. Again this is the percentage thing I mentioned—the study is not claiming that more white and Asian men leave because of unfair treatment than women, it's claiming that of those who leave , more white and Asian men report unfair treatment as a motivation than women do.

So this study shows that unfair treatment is a less important reason for women leaving tech than it is for Asian and white men. Why, then, are other people commenting here claiming that bad treatment of women is the main reason they leave tech, and at alarming numbers, no less?

If the raw fraction of women leaving is much higher than it is for Asian and white men, then the net effect is that a higher percentage of women are leaving because of unfair treatment than men are.

Also, it's certainly the case that unfair treatment is a problem worth solving regardless of gender.

(I don't think the design of that particular study was equipped to answer the question of what the raw fraction is / whether the numbers are in fact alarming, so people who are making that claim are not making it solely on the basis of information in that study.)

Post reply on HN