Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 630 posts

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

#481

Post by seanmcdirmid »

WalterBright wrote: post #344
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's really too bad they never released a compilation DVD set of it. AL is consistently funnier than SNL. Much of the humor is local, though.

My favorite is the 425 area code skit, with a snobby lady (in character) complaining about Renton being in the same area code as Bellevue. No one outside of the Seattle area would ever get that joke, however.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9jlo4Ht2YA

Done in the same style as the WSU drinking ban...another later classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Kozfrph9LU

Or Bill Nye as a street walking lawyer on Aurora avenue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgAgPnrJAuQ

They put everything on YouTube. No need for a dvd :)

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

#482

Post by Impossible »

jimbokun wrote: post #471
Impossible wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of people fall into the first category, regardless of sex. There are a lot of people who with exposure might consider software development as a career, but didn't think of it as an option. For various historical reasons (exposure to programmable computers, video games, adults that can explain or teach programming, access in school, peers that program, role models, etc) the people that tend to realize pro…

5 years old? Are you joking? The Dot Net bubble in the 90s was arguably the biggest news story of the decade. Everyone knew there was tons of money to be had in tech, and stories of people landing jobs at startups after learning a little bit of HTML.

I'm aware of the dot com bubble. My point wasn't that people weren't making money, my point is tech looked risky and new, especially the web based companies that dominate now. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc were stable jobs but they were for engineers/nerds. There was money to be made back then of course but money isn't the only thing that makes jobs attractive. Social and cultural status and stability are important as well. A doctor is a safe, high paying, high status job. Tech is only just now starting to look that way to mainstream people.

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

#483

Post by joshuamorton »

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?

Depending on exactly what you mean, mythbusters or Mr. Robot count.

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

#484

Post by mewpmewp2 »

koonsolo wrote: post #285
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…

I worked with a few women in software development. 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women. "Men are more honest and straightforward, women more jealous and backstabbing". Their words, not mine. But since the whole upheaval of women in workplaces that flowed to Europe from US, I have the feeling that this sentiment has changed.

I am from Europe. I keep hearing the same things. Although it is anecdotal and from other people. At times it seems women have it constantly against each other focusing a lot of their time on social power plays. Myself I work in an environment with 97 percent male ratio so I do not have enough experience to comment on it myself. I would rather have it 50/50 at this point though. I think it would be less boring.

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

#486

Post by showingdead »

tptacek wrote: post #385
banads wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Accepting that girl infants prefer faces and boy infants prefer trucks—what does that have to do with programming? Programming jobs often involve extremely minimal face to face interactions

I've spent the last 15 years of my life working with engineering teams, hundreds of them, and I've never met a single one that worked this way. The opposite thing is true, unless you're fixated on literal in-the-same-room face-to-face interactions, in which case, what's your point?

The core activity of software engineering, programming, writing code, is a solitary activity. It's what people think of when they think of programming. It's what we spend hours being trained for, getting good at. Yes, in between writing software, we need to coordinate with others, so we have meetings. You'd really describe this overall process as being more people-oriented than thing-oriented?

I've heard the argument that somehow "actual coding is a relatively small part of being a software engineer," but unless you're a manager (of which there are many more women), the thing you're being trained for, the thing you spend most of your time doing, and the basis of how people perceive the profession, is sitting in front of a computer coding. You can describe any profession as people-oriented on the basis that one needs to work with others, but the key question is whether the basic activity of the job is a social one.

Regardless of whether the people-vs-thing distinction is significant or not, it seems inaccurate in a big-picture way to describe programming as people-oriented. Like, that's not what people mean when they draw that distinction.

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

#487

Post by speedplane »

koonsolo wrote: post #285
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…

I worked with a few women in software development. 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women. "Men are more honest and straightforward, women more jealous and backstabbing". Their words, not mine. But since the whole upheaval of women in workplaces that flowed to Europe from US, I have the feeling that this sentiment has changed.

> I worked with a few women in software development. 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women.

There are far more male bosses than female bosses. Accordingly, assuming bad bosses are relatively rare, it's far more likely every female boss you've ever had is awful than every male boss you've ever had is awful. This is just probability.

Let's take an example. Suppose 10% of bosses are awful, regardless of gender. Further suppose that due historical societal reasons, only 20% of bosses are female. If you've had 3 different bosses in your career, there's a far likelier chance that every female boss you've had is awful (3.94%) than every male boss you've had is awful (1.4%). (I'll leave it as an exercise to derive these numbers).

So, even if men and women are just as likely to be awful, you're nearly 3 times as likely for all of your female bosses to be awful than all of your male bosses to be awful simply due to the fact that women are under-represented.

This probability may explain at least some of this common and sad bias against female bosses.

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

#488

Post by showingdead »

rayiner wrote: post #132
Reedx wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 “bu…

The purpose of the faces/trucks data point is just to illustrate that these differences start from birth. The larger argument is that the people-vs-things gap, and later, interest in computers specifically, basically remains stable throughout childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge...

I don't even know if the data is ready for us to draw any conclusions, but at the very least it seems to me we should find this to be an extremely interesting pattern, and use it to motivate hypotheses.

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

#489

Post by mikekchar »

tmh79 wrote: post #318
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…

> As to the men being jerks/toxic etc argument... I think its a lot more complicated than this. Yes, men and women can be jerks. The bigger issues seem to be when a team is 80%+ one gender or another, and the issues aren't about "being mean" the issues are about the dominant group being blind to and then not accommodating the nondominant group's needs. A huge problem is that we have a lot of 6 person tech teams with…

Keep in mind that if I am in a team of 5, then 80% of the group is in the dominant "not-me group" and 20% is in the minority "me group". We often (and reasonably) choose to prioritise the needs of the dominant group over the non-dominant group. If I want to use Elm, but the rest of the team wants to use JS and React, I'd actually be a bit of a jerk to force them all to accommodate my wishes.

While contrived, I'm convinced this is precisely the problem. If I am a woman on a team of men, am I a bit of a jerk for demanding that the rest of the team accommodates me? Perhaps they all have a communication style that suits them that is born from their upbringing as male children while I have a communication style that equally suits me, but is different from theirs. Must I adapt to their system, or should they adapt to mine?

When we talk about programming style, or preferences for tools the answer is seemingly easy. We go with the majority so that we please the most people. When we talk about gender, sexual orientation, race, etc the answer is much more complex. We can divide our groups in infinite ways and yet some categorisations are chosen to be significant while others are not.

Because of this, I feel that it is actually really important that we recognise that we will not and can not accommodate everyone. Being different, having a different opinion, having a different set of experiences is not actually enough to warrant special treatment. In many cases we choose to discriminate: no matter how good a Java programmer you are, we will not write our frontend in GWT! (Real story: I maintain a frontend written in Java and GWT, so I'm taking some liberties ;-) ).

As I said, there are some special cases where we have decided that we wish to provide special accommodation. We do this because, on balance, we believe that doing so enriches our societies. It will always be a tradeoff, though, and it's important to understand that.

Consider the word "discrimination". Without that word, we can not discriminate between "good" and "bad". We do not want to live in a world without discrimination. We should always strive to discriminate in such a way as it makes the world a better place. We wish to avoid behaviour that works against our interests and encourage behaviour that works for our interests.

To that end, we specifically discriminate in certain situations so that we accommodate minority groups in a way that we feel enhances our society. It should not be a surprise if we occasionally get this wrong and I strongly discourage people from assuming that the "right" answer is easy to determine. It is important that we think very carefully about which things we wish accommodate (minority representation of gender, sexual orientation, race) and things which we do not wish to accommodate (hate speech, violent behaviour, and GWT :-D).

P.S. I hereby apologise for my horrible characterisation of Java and GWT. I actually don't mind it that much...

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

#490

Post by westoncb »

speedplane wrote: post #487
koonsolo wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with a few women in software development. 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women. "Men are more honest and straightforward, women more jealous and backstabbing". Their words, not mine. But since the whole upheaval of women in workplaces that flowed to Europe from US, I have the feeling that this sentiment has changed.

> I worked with a few women in software development. 2 of them separately told me they liked working in an all men team more than working with women. There are far more male bosses than female bosses. Accordingly, assuming bad bosses are relatively rare, it's far more likely every female boss you've ever had is awful than every male boss you've ever had is awful. This is just probability. Let's take an example. Suppo…

Someone want to break down how to calculate the odds here?
Post reply on HN