The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#361

Post by TulliusCicero » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 10:37 PM UTC

Thorentis wrote: post #308

TulliusCicero wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And women are punished for demanding pay increases, so they can't win either way.

Source?

https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/lean-out-t...

> In four studies, Bowles and collaborators from Carnegie Mellon found that people penalized women who initiated negotiations for higher compensation more than they did men. The effect held whether they saw the negotiation on video or read about it on paper, whether they viewed it from a disinterested third-party perspective or imagined themselves as senior managers in a corporation evaluating an internal candidate. Even women penalized the women who initiated the conversation, though they also penalized the men who did so. They just didn’t seem to like seeing someone ask for more money.

The paper: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/cfawis/bowles.pdf

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#362

Post by briandear » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 10:38 PM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #276

TulliusCicero wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How many engineers are represented in the media in general? Has there been a hit TV show with male engineers as the main character?

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#363

Post by TulliusCicero » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 10:38 PM UTC

ajro wrote: post #319

TulliusCicero wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Males and females have different preferences on average, and do from birth[1]. This is not a bad thing. Sure, but it seems more than a little convenient that the male-chosen professions seem to generally pay significantly more, on average, than the female-chosen ones. Haven't there been studies that showed that women moving into a profession was actually associated with pay dropping?

And the so called 'male-chosen' professions generally have higher risk of serious health consequences, injuries or death.

It's true that men tend to hold more of the physically dangerous professions, but the ones well known for being high paying, like software engineering or finance, generally don't fit that model.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#364

Post by thatcat » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 10:39 PM UTC

zarkov99 wrote: post #311

foldr wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who? This is an obscure issue. I should think that very few Americans are even aware of the disparity.

I think people who are not part of the culture war, which I believe is most people, would be perfectly fine with this disparity.

I doubt that many 18 y/o males are fine with it since that doubles the chances that they'll be forced to enroll in the military for very little pay. I'm sure most other people would prefer that 18 y/o males continue to be the selectively signed up and have no problem with females not doing the same. Imho though, either everyone should be forced to enroll or no one should - most military workers are support staff anyway.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#365

Post by foldr » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 10:41 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #351

foldr wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I understand you correctly, people who like working alone on challenging tasks are inherently deficient and we need to drive them out of the workplace to make others more comfortable? You can't possibly think that this is what the person you are replying to is saying. But anyway, the point is that the conception of programming as a task suited to people who like to work in isolation is incorrect and harmful. One…

> You can't possibly think that this is what the person you are replying to is saying. I do think that. I think programming selects for people high in introversion and maybe even on the autistic spectrum. I think some extroverted people find those people deficient and don't like working with them, and would like to change the working environment to be less comfortable for the introverts and more comfortable for the e…

Programming culture selects for those people, to an extent.

If you're employed as a programmer, you're most likely being paid to solve other people's problems by writing code. If you can't communicate with those people, you'll never be able to do that successfully.

It's no conspiracy. A socially clueless introvert who's being paid a lot of money to do nothing useful doesn't have much to offer.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#366

Post by Consultant32452 » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 10:42 PM UTC

foldr wrote: post #270

TulliusCicero wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Measuring these things by outcomes is always wrought with errors. For example, how do you compare women's interest in medicine 50 years ago to their interest in comp sci today? If raw interest is low even a trivial scale issue might dissuade you.

It's also dangerous to treat all software development the same. I'm my experience women tend to be more interested in human facing parts of software like web and ui development, but less interested in the back end parts. Is this the result of sexism? Maybe, but regardless I bet the gender stats are very different if you consider front end as different than back end development.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#367

Post by pkghost » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 10:42 PM UTC

lgleason wrote: post #130

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…

Downvoted for this:

> Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in

What?! Equality of outcome, as I've encountered it, is always downstream of individual choice. That is, it's up to the hiring committee to enforce gender parity by selecting from available applicants, and not up to educators or policy-makers to force equal amounts of women to be in STEM. No one has ever, to my knowledge, made the argument the way you represented it (except, ironically, incels calling for mandated marriage).

I'd have taken you more seriously if you hadn't straw-manned the shit out of equality of outcome.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#368

Post by jayd16 » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #362

bobthepanda wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How many engineers are represented in the media in general? Has there been a hit TV show with male engineers as the main character?

Big bang theory, for example, has mostly male nerds. The core Silicon Valley engineering team is male. There are of course exceptions but male and female engineers are not represented equally in media.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#369

Post by zarkov99 » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 10:44 PM UTC

foldr wrote: post #315

zarkov99 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but would you expect a 50/50 split if it was? And if you do not expect it, then how would you explain any remaining disparity?

You are talking about a hypothetical scenario where all sexist stereotypes are eliminated. It’s obviously silly to guess at what the numbers would be. I see no reason to expect a precise 50/50 gender balance in every one of the listed fields. Conversely, I would also not expect to see the massive disparities that we see currently. The problem in STEM isn’t that the gender balance isn’t exactly 50/50. It’s that substa…

If you cannot guess what the numbers should be then how would you know the problem is fixed? Or even if there is any problem at all?

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM (2018)

#370

Post by roenxi » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 10:45 PM UTC

foldr wrote: post #336

roenxi wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Men didn't like the idea because it is an objectively bad idea in an era where population really mattered. This is an argument that's rarely if ever been used against allowing women to serve in the military. I think it's the argument that you'd like people to make rather than an argument that people have actually historically made. More broadly, if you see women primarily as baby machines, then military service shou…

Well it is is pretty obvious to me that in day to day practice women were kept out of the army because (as sibling poster) they are physically worse fighters than men by raw strength. But it is also pretty obvious to me that over the centuries brilliant military planners would have regularly thought about using women on the front lines and then rejected the idea for much better reasons than 'I'm a sexist'. The stereotypes here aren't arbitrary, an unbiased thinker would have reasonably reached the same practices.

And we can't really say for certain that what everybody thought was controlling what happened. What everybody thinks and what actually happens in, eg, banking and finance are completely different. The people in control are not the people talking on the street.

> More broadly, if you see women primarily as baby machines, then military service should be the least of your worries when it comes to fertility.

Call me old fashioned but I'm ruling out the idea that men are the primary baby making engine of humanity.

On your actual point; the fact that there are other things to think about doesn't stop people thinking about this specific thing. The US lost 400,000 servicemen in WWII without really even seeing a foreign invasion; those sort of numbers absolutely should involve someone asking the question 'who can we most and least afford to lose?'. The militaries of the world are not warm and happy-go-lucky organisations. They ask quite unpleasant questions all the time.