Chess Grandmaster David Smerdon (PhD, Economics) noticed a similar correlation with chess too: https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-best-and-worst-countries-t...
The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)
131–140 of 630 posts
Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)
#132Coming from one of these countries to America, the answer seems obvious. STEM jobs have a HUGE differential in stability and status in those countries, so women put up up with much more patriarchal BS at the workplace to hold on to them. My sister was a STEM worker in India. When she moved to America, she looked around to see writers with relatively safe, high-status job and switched out immediately. Yes, women in Am…
Ask women and you'll find that most aren't interested in programming a computer all day. Which one could argue is a sane choice. If anything it's more sane. Stop trying to make them feel like something is wrong if they don't have this inclination. Males and females have different preferences on average, some as early as birth[1]. This is not a bad thing. For the ones that want to program all day, obviously they shoul…
> Males and females have different preferences on average, and do from birth[1]. This is not a bad thing.
I feel like this is a “??? Profit!” argument. Accepting that girl infants prefer faces and boy infants prefer trucks—what does that have to do with programming? Even within the context of traditional stereotypes about male/female preferences, what makes programming a “male” thing? The analogy that programmers “build things” is just that—your typical programmer is certainly not cut out to be a construction worker.
Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just said you advocate gender-segregated education. How is that not a statement on what you believe to be correct for everyone?
I did say that ‘this is a BS theory of mine’ and that I would like to know what others feel about it. It’s right at the beginning of my comment. Do you want to read it again?
very trumpian actually, similarly how he says:
"some people say", "so I heard" then spews off things to argue a point and convince you. Then there is an easy escape, I "just heard that"
same way, no one writes so many lines of arguments, in such detail, then say, oh it is all BS
Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which differences. There is the genitalia that nobody argues with. Likewise testosterone differences. Pretty much everything else isn't as clear cut. We know that more men than women go into STEM - but we don't know if it is because men fundamentally like those jobs better, or if it is because our culture makes it less acceptable for women to go into STEM. Often culture things are subtle and people will say things th…
That's not true. We know from history that a much larger percentage of programmers in the US were women before it became a lucrative career. > Between 30 and 50 percent of programmers were women in the 1950s, and it was seen as a natural career for them, as evidenced by a 1967 Cosmopolitan feature about “Computer Girls.” [1] [1] https://timeline.com/women-pioneered-computer-programming-th...
In the 1950s male culture saw computer as a boring career worth of only women. Note literally computer, sitting down with a piece of paper and calculating some figure by hand - a human spreadsheet if it were. Computer morphed into computer programmer with the advent of electronic computers, and soon afterwards men got involved.
Feminists made big advances at the same time and so it is hard to separate which factor (or something I can't think of) is important and which an irrelevant coincidence.
Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
It absolutely does. I know many men in India who would rather do something else than do engineering. Look at the background of most standup comedians in India for example. Most of them come from engineering/stem background and use that to fulfill their side hustle to be a comic and then become full time comics if successful. I was personally far more interested in studying classic Sanskrit literature, but was talked…
I should rephrase. Why does it affect men disproportionately less?
I come from a very progressive family that always tried to treat me and my sister equally. Still, I think there was a much larger social pressure on me to be financially successful than my sister. And that is in a very progressive country, too, in more conservative countries the effect is probably larger still.
Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not advocating gender segregation but just gender segregated education. That's quite literally what you're arguing for. Doesn't "jobs board and work spaces for JUST WOMEN" sound familiar to you? You're advocating for bringing us back the 1960s, and worse, the argument you're using is eerily close to "separate but equal." The format of that and "separate water fountains" is identical. It’s a constant battle of wi…
> given the obnoxious use of caps lock and lack of critical thinking skills, you probably If you post in the flamewar style to HN like this we will ban you. If you attack another user personally like this we will ban you. You're extremely familiar with HN. Don't do this again.
On the off-chance that I was spam-filtered again: I sent a message to hn@yc to keep my comments about metadrama off the site.
Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)
#137Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)
#138People ask me how The Atlantic differs from Harper's. Here is a good example. Harper's would _not_ run an article that would even suggest a crack in the framework of leftist orthodoxy. But noting the date of the article, would this article be published now that Mrs Jobs is at the helm? Perhaps not...
The Atlantic was bought by Laurene Powell Jobs in July 2017[0], about nine months before this article was published.
I've stopped asking people not to make such accusations without any evidence. But could you at least check if the most basic facts do not contradict them?
Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)
#139It all comes down to equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. When there is equality of opportunity women choose different fields...often (but not always) because of different interests. Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in. And that is before you get into interests vs natural talent and how that does or does not affect ones success in a field. On a fundamental l…
> As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument. Are there times when that is true? Absolutely. But, men do not have a monopoly on being jerks
I'd say the bigger point against the idea that women aren't in CS purely* because of men being sexist, is that this implies that male doctors and lawyers in the 60's and 70's were less sexist than male engineers of today. Does anyone actually believe this?
* of course, it may still be a partial factor
Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)
#140If you look at the scatterplot excluding the four countries at the bottom right (Algeria, Turkey, Tunisia, UAE), you get basically a circle and (to my eye anyway) the trendline is horizontal, meaning, no correlation. Moreover, there are two countries with approximately the same gender inequality but many fewer women in STEM, namely Qatar and Korea. It seems to me that reducing this to "the more gender equality, the f…
> If you look at the scatterplot excluding the four countries at the bottom right (Algeria, Turkey, Tunisia, UAE), you get basically a circle and (to my eye anyway) the trendline is horizontal, meaning, no correlation.
Their hypothesis doesn't predict a straight line.
Rather, they're saying that free women don't tend to choose STEM as often as men in the same society choose STEM. If they're correct, then we should expect a lack of data points in the top-right quadrant, above those 4 you pointed out, as such points would represent free societies in which women do pick STEM.
For there to be a straight line, we'd have to further assume that oppressive societies always force women into STEM, which doesn't follow. For example, early-1900's America didn't grant women freedom, but it didn't force them into STEM, either.