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

291–300 of 310 posts

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

#291

Post by tnzn »

dahart wrote: post #144

> 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.

It's just there's a Math "religion" in the West, and Math is pretty much a sort of holy discipline that's the basis of the hierarchized school system, and I guess it makes people believe such things. It's even more prevalent in France where up till now, general high school shared their students between 3 cursus which were scientifc, economic and litterary. They are hierarchized in the way you know, and pretty much defined by their degree... Of math.

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

#292

Post by omginternets »

akvadrako wrote: post #86
omginternets wrote: post #47

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797617741719 Wonderful. Yet another publicly-funded research project with implications for public policy that is behind a paywall. I guess I'll never know the details of how "gender equality" was operationalized, and therefore never have an informed interpretation of these data. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

http://sci-hub.tw

Ah, so it's .tw now.

Do they announce their domain changes somewhere?

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

#293

Post by mpweiher »

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.

> it looks like an artificial phenomenon.

Yes. But to a large part that's because it is specifically presented as such.

For example, the graph in the episode looks very damning. However, it is an extract, arguably in order for it to look as damning as possible. Here's a more complete version of the same:

http://www.randalolson.com/wp-content/uploads/percent-bachel...

Hmm...now it's not nearly as lopsided as that extract. First, there are all these subjects that are at least as and actually even more lopsided than CS, and dominated by women. In fact, more fields are dominated by women than by men (which has to be the case because there are more women in universities). But that doesn't fit the narrative, so out they go.

And of course the CS curve approaches the general engineering curve. Hmmm...maybe that's because CS is a lot like general engineering. So maybe the outlier is not the end of that curve (where CS approaches engineering), but the beginning of the curve?

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

#294

Post by tetromino_ »

dogma1138 wrote: post #272
lowry wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry that’s not true on both accounts. Yes the USSR has had women in combat (so did other allied nations, even the US it just didn’t sent them to the front lines) however in very small amounts and mainly for propaganda purposes and while some of them achieved great things as far as anyone can be great in a war these weren’t by any stretch of the imagination the norm. In the post war economy women were locked out of…

I strongly suspect that your mother's unfortunate experience was 100% caused by official Soviet antisemitism, not by anything about her gender. Post-war Soviet policy was to deny most Jews the right to even study in prestigious universities, to deny them higher degrees for spurious reasons, and exclude them from many research institutions [1] - is it any wonder that your mother found it difficult to obtain a university teaching position?

> While the USSR might have been seen as a “feminist” heaven back in the day it was far from that

Compared to the West at the time, the USSR was feminist. I have talked to several Soviet Jewish women who emigrated to the US in the 1970s. All of them were struck by blatant gender discrimination that was normal in America at the time, but to them seemed like something out of a 19th century novel; for example, needing a husband's permission to open a bank account.

[1] See, for example, https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Антисемитизм_в_советской_матем...

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

#295

Post by carlmr »

kyleschiller wrote: post #167
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…

Which country do you assume OP is in? In Germany women only make up 16% of engineers http://www.zeit.de/2013/38/frauenanteil-ingenieure. In my starting class of 300 ten years ago there were 5 women in electrical and computer engineering. Mech and building engineering was much higher. Computer science was somewhat in between. In my high school some girls went for math and many for medicine (still a science, somewhat), but none went for engineering or computer science AFAIK.

I think you're too easily discounting his personal experience. If you ask me, at least in Germany, EE and CS is pretty much devoid of women. And if you're talking about dating, a small pool of women surrounded by men will probably be off the market most of the time. So him never dating engineers at least in my experience, is the norm.

They're doing a lot here to attract girls to STEM, but it isn't bearing much fruit.

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

#296

Post by coldtea »

aspaceman wrote: post #170
coldtea wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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.

So, doesn't the post contradict this? Less women are in STEM in countries with BETTER equality.

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

#297

Post by shortsightedsid »

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…

My 10 year daughter loves legos but complained the other day it seems only boys play legos. I would argue that legos and building things for fun is STEM, and it's curious why girls aren't encouraged to play with legos as much as boys in the U.S. This is despite things like lego friends that are targeting younger girls. Once they hit around 10-11, then all the legos seem to be engineering oriented (robotics etc..), which she loves but can't understand why other girls don't get it.

Note: Am Indian and can totally see the same problem you noted.

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

#299

Post by dang_ »

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…

You committed thought crime, to the Gulag with you!

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

#300

Post by norikki »

erezsh wrote: post #286
friedButter wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-firing-of-diversity-memo-a... >Google didn't break the law when it fired James Damore over a memo that criticized the company's diversity policies and claimed tech's gender gap may be due to biological differences between men and women. You're right, its some other entity in US that interprets laws, I assumed it was a court

And they didn't even weigh in on the science, they just said the science was irrelevant if it caused a "hostile working environment".

The head of the National Labor Relations Board said it was scientifically false that girls are biologically less likely to become interested in STEM when they grow up. So yea, they very much are making scientific claims out their ass and calling it harrasment to point out that they're wrong.
Post reply on HN