341–350 of 630 posts
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It’s not suggested as a ‘solution’. It’s an ‘option’ some of us women would like...that’s all.
I am very sorry this happened to you, this kind of behaviour would not be tolerated in Europe. Could this be related to the fact POTUS literally said to "grab women by the pussy"?
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> the kind of differences in performance and achievement that would be explained by psychological and physiological differences between men and women That's a bit of circular reasoning though. - Look how men and women behave differently! - But why do they behave differently? - Because they're different. - How do you know that? - Because they behave differently. It's not logically consistent and doesn't answer anythin…
Throwaway commenter, despite being downvoted, you're absolutely right! I'm a woman. I AM A WOMAN IN STEM. You know what makes my blood pressure rise? People in real life and in this thread who tell me that I'm naturally not suited to it, that I like people more than things. Go away! Shut the f(*& up! I want to sit here and deal with my code and not have people tell me that I either don't know what I like or I'm not a…
This is a misrepresentation of what people are writing in this thread. People are not saying that women who work in STEM are "not natural" or are working in a field they are unsuited for. They're saying that natural population-wide differences mean that the fact that women choose to enter computing at lower rates than men is not indicative of sexism. Saying that computing is 20% women because of biological differences is not making any statement of the capabilities of those women that go into computing.
> Maybe we won't get to 50-50 in some STEM fields. Who cares.
Many people do indeed subscribe to the belief that STEM should have parity between the sexes, and many companies are employing discriminatory policies to achieve this. And this doesn't just hurt men. When people witness discrimination in their companies' hiring processes, they look around and at their co-workers and wonder, "would this person have been hired if they didn't belong to a 'diverse' demographic?" Do you think this helps women?
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As a man, I'll say I absolutely agree. I went to an all-boys high school, and teenage boys simply do better without girls around. Boys are more likely to engage in not traditionally masculine activities when girls are not around because there is no need to impress. Furthermore, girls often mature faster than boys, and this leads to unnecessary stress for both girls and boys at this stage. Furthermore, a lot of what d…
I really can't overstate how skeptical I am of all the supposed benefits of gender-segregated schooling when attendance of a gender-segregated school is so strongly correlated with socioeconomic class. I agree that all of your explanations fall well on my metaphorical ears. They seem right, and I can nod along while I read them. But I can't help but have a nagging suspicion that you'd get extremely similar results if…
I went to an all boys school with mostly working class boys of color (54% hispanic, 26% white, 13% asian, 6% black -- 75% non-white students ) next to Compton, though, so while I do agree that private schooling is associated with higher socioeconomic class, that was not my experience, and all I gave was my experience.
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Was Almost Live the source of the skit "Studs from Microsoft"? Microsoft used to ship that skit as a demonstration video on their Microsoft Video API MSDN CDs. EDIT: Found a Raymond Chen blog entry confirming that the skit was indeed from Almost Live -- and it featured Bill Nye.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZOSdFBfpSQ First aired in 1992. I miss that show. Cops in Redmond is another classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pxGDSucCEI
It 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…
Implicit bias also guides interests and choice. Many women I meet today simply did not consider the possibility of an engineering career, not that they were forced out of it. We look to outcome equality to gain some kind of insight into this.
The existence of implicit bias is contentious. All purported tests to measure its existence have failed replication.
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> 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 s…
>this implies that male doctors and lawyers in the 60's and 70's were less sexist than male engineers of today. I don't see how it implies this. The more relevant question is whether STEM has higher levels of sexism than other similarly attractive fields.
Gender disparity fell in those professions, while in roughly the same time frame, gender disparity dramatically increased in STEM. If women could put up with the sexism in those two professions, is it really plausible that sexism is the reason they didn't similarly push into STEM?
Engineers would have had to have been a lot more sexist to explain this data.
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>It's about equal rights, equal treatment, it does not mean that men and women are the same, it's not a mathematical equality. Sure, perhaps in theory. In practice, the kind of differences in performance and achievement that would be explained by psychological and physiological differences between men and women are immediately blamed on discrimination and the like. There is an implicit assumption that men and women a…
> the kind of differences in performance and achievement that would be explained by psychological and physiological differences between men and women That's a bit of circular reasoning though. - Look how men and women behave differently! - But why do they behave differently? - Because they're different. - How do you know that? - Because they behave differently. It's not logically consistent and doesn't answer anythin…
> - Look how men and women behave differently!
> - But why do they behave differently?
> - Because they're different.
> - How do you know that?
> - Because differences are observed at birth, are relatively consistent across countries with vastly different cultures, and the differences in behavior are observed even when raising children in a controlled environment free of gendered roles.
Fixed that for you.
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> Many women I meet today simply did not consider the possibility of an engineering career And I'm sure many men simply did not consider the possibility of a career in female dominated professions, like nursing or elementary education. I think there's certainly something to the idea that we internalize stereotypes and that can restrict our options, but I'm skeptical that it generally explains large differences in car…
Media representation? Female lawyers and female doctors are fairly common in media. Female engineers, not so much, and definitely not in a context where the women are not deviating from social norms (you need to be a tomboy, you need to be geeky, you need to be "not like those other girls" etc.) Representation is important - MLK convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay on Star Trek because she was, at the time, the only bl…
Now, yes, but what about in the 60's and 70's?
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Actually, a lot of people are saying that sexism is the cause of disparity in those cases. It's a commonplace observation that sexism harms men as well as women. Historically, the professions you're alluding to have been closed to women by men . So for example, the reason that women couldn't serve in the military until relatively recently is not that women used their power and influence within society to get a pass o…
I'd hope if women had thought about the serving example they would have made the same choice out of a sensible respect for setting up the future. A society that keeps their women from dying needless deaths has a reproductive advantage over societies that send them into the meat grinder - the protective society can produce more children after the conflict. From a quick and lazy glance at some statistics [0] losing a y…
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How could it not imply it? That's when women started entering those fields en masse and really increasing their numbers. Going by the "the problem is men being sexist" reasoning, that they were able to do this successfully implies that the lawyers and doctors in charge then were less sexist than engineers today.
It does not imply this, because it's likely to be relative rather than absolute levels of sexism that are relevant.