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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

#301

Post by naasking »

pvg wrote: post #283
naasking wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if you accept essentially any and all finding, however iffy, about gender-based cognitive differences, there is a huge leap from that to 'women are simply unsuitable for your typical programming job, to an 80/20 ratio Who said anything about unsuitability? I said the difference isn't necessarily artificial like the OP claimed, and you jump somehow to it being a matter of ability or temperament? You're putting…

I said the difference isn't necessarily artificial like the OP claimed How do you connect any things/people preference to performance or disparity thereof in a generic programming job? It explains the disparity only if you make a substantial assumption not in evidence.

Did you even read what I wrote? Who's talking about performance?

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

#304

Post by acid_dog »

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 theory is that many not-that-rich countries didn't have opportunity to go through a period where some jobs are thought as strictly male/female (think 50s in the US). Coming from such a country, and being a woman, I never heard from my parents, or another adult for that matter, that engineering wouldn't be suitable for a girl. This wasn't just because there is money in engineering. It was the same for less lucrative professions in STEM. The concept of woman needing to pick a suitable profession was just not there. Education was important for both genders. I am very thankful for that and it bothers me when people say women from my part of the world enter STEM just because of money. It's just not true for majority of STEM women that I met.

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

#305

Post by dogma1138 »

tetromino_ wrote: post #294
dogma1138 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 universi…

It wasn’t just antisemtism it was the fact that women barred from any progression.

Sure in US it might have been oh honey why do you need to work but in the USSR it was much worse it was horrible exploitation under the guise of liberation.

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

#306

Post by therealdrag0 »

naasking wrote: post #301
pvg wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said the difference isn't necessarily artificial like the OP claimed How do you connect any things/people preference to performance or disparity thereof in a generic programming job? It explains the disparity only if you make a substantial assumption not in evidence.

Did you even read what I wrote? Who's talking about performance?

Aside: I feel for you here `naasking`. It's amazing how hard it is to have a conversation on these types of topics without people jumping to the conclusions about the position you're trying to illuminate.

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

#307

Post by therealdrag0 »

rbehrends wrote: post #129

I can't help but think that the article/paper are overstating a statistical effect here by attempting to reduce a multicausal phenomenon to a monocausal one. If you look just at rich western countries, most of them occupy a fairly narrow strip on the graph. There are outliers, but they can go either way; Finland has a very low STEM graduation rate for women, Denmark a very high one (Figure 3b in the paper). Austria a…

Seems like a valid consideration. You should write a letter to the authors :)

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

#308

Post by pvg »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #306
naasking wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you even read what I wrote? Who's talking about performance?

Aside: I feel for you here `naasking`. It's amazing how hard it is to have a conversation on these types of topics without people jumping to the conclusions about the position you're trying to illuminate.

'Did you even read that' being the typical polite invitation to reasoned conversation.

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

#309

Post by ghostcluster »

geofft wrote: post #117
ghostcluster wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers Not only is this true, it has been fairly exhaustively researched. > Cross-cultural consistency of sex differences for four traits: extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and male-versus-female-typical occupational preferences. Men and women differed on all four traits. 200,000 participants from 53 nations. > O…

That paper doesn't provide evidence for a biological basis for occupational preferences (which was an online BBC survey for a TV show "Secrets of the Sexes," asking people to self-report how interested they were in 10 professions, many of which are strongly culturally gendered or "male-versus-female-typical" as the author puts it). It seems pretty likely that there's a biological basis for differences in base persona…

Here's a meta-analysis then: http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Men-and-thing...

> Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things–People dimension. Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = 0.35), Social (d = 0.68), and Conventional (d = 0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests.

> The present study suggests that interests may play a critical role in gendered occupational choices and gender disparity in the STEM fields.

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

#310

Post by lowry »

dogma1138 wrote: post #305
tetromino_ wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 universi…

It wasn’t just antisemtism it was the fact that women barred from any progression. Sure in US it might have been oh honey why do you need to work but in the USSR it was much worse it was horrible exploitation under the guise of liberation.

It is a bit too late, but I just stubled upon a mini-series documentary by Leonid Parfenov about Russian Jews. As Parfenov points out, Russian Empire and then Soviet Union and contemporary Russian went over periods of both antisemitism and judophilia. Those interested in the history of Russian Jews should really watch it.
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