491–500 of 630 posts
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Speculate as you please. This is an extremely obscure issue, and I suspect that very few people have a strong opinion on it. (If I'm wrong about this, it should be easy to point to a counterexample.)
It is an extremely obscure issue because the vast majority consider women signing up for the draft to be ludicrous, and dismiss the conversation thereafter.
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>"people who like working alone on challenging tasks are inherently deficient" sounds like an accurate summary of that view. ??? I don't say that they're deficient as people, or that working in isolation is bad per se. I'm just saying that people who like to work in isolation are unlikely to make good programmers (in the context of a typical programming job). Personally, I switched to programming from academia, where…
Ah, so you are in an environment with “not very challenging problems” and you assume all work environments are like that. Now it makes sense.
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I am talking about relative levels of sexism in the present, not in the 60s and 70s.
But the 60's and 70's are when the representation levels started really diverging. That's the key part. That they may be less sexist now, after having achieved gender parity or something close to it, is hardly unexpected. Of course a field with roughly even numbers is usually going to be less sexist than one dominated by one gender or another.
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I think you are reading a lot into my comment that isn't there. I don't know exactly why women fifty years ago made the decisions that they did. You don't, either.
You're being vague and deflecting here. In one comment you suggest that the cause is law and medicine being relatively less sexist, and here you just say, "well, we don't know why they did what they did." Well, which is it? What basis do you have for your earlier point? > You don't, either. Why would you even say this? The comment you responded to didn't have me asserting a reason why. It's like you're attacking a st…
I claimed that this is the case today. You are the only one of us making any assertions whatsoever about levels of sexism in the 1960s and 1970s, which are irrelevant to choices women make now.
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First of all, note that this argument works both ways. You also can’t put exact numbers on how many women we’d expect there to be in the industry in the absence of any sexism whatever. So how do you know that there’s no problem? But actually, the question is quite easy to answer for me. I am more interested in sexism per se than in the gender distribution. When women in the industry infrequently report that they are…
> When women in the industry infrequently report that they are experiencing sexism, then I’ll consider that we’re well on the way to solving the problem. This is the fox guarding the henhouse. There is no incentive for women to ever stop crying "sexism!" if this is the criterion in use.
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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…
A few years ago I was on a plane wearing a sweater with the logo of the major tech company I work at. The person sitting next to me was excited to talk to me about how he was trying to develop his son into an engineer. His son was like six. He was buying his son toys and games that tried to promote an interest in technology. He also had a daughter. Similar age. He was not doing the same for her. Perhaps these childre…
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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…
Historically, the military mostly drafted people, especially if we look at the last 100 years. Conscription has very little to do with choices, and male only conscription has a long history. There is a good discussion to be had over why conscription has mostly been male only. Is it powerful men wanting to get rid of young expendable men in some form of evolutionary benefit to themselves? It it because of historical b…
As you point out, the people in charge were all men. It was up to them to make the rules about who could or couldn't volunteer and who would or wouldn't be conscripted.
>Most people would agree that white men used their power and influence to get a pass on military service.
This perfectly illustrates my point. That is exactly not how women got a pass on military service. Thus, it misses the point to complain that men disproportionately do certain dangerous jobs. Women have been kept out of those jobs by men, and by sexist attitudes more broadly, not by some kind of inverse sexism that favors women over men.
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>For example, women were once stereotyped as not being doctors or lawyers, but that didn't seem to stop them from joining those fields en masse. If internalized stereotyping didn't matter enough to stop them then, for those fields, why does it matter now for engineering? The fields you mention made serious efforts to counter sexism. STEM hasn't, yet.
Medicine and Law have made serious efforts to counter sexism? Like what? Law is essentially the definition of the "Old Boys Club" and as for Medicine... I used to work in the medical field for a while. Go ask any (female) surgical nurse about the supposed efforts to counter sexism in the OR. I don't believe your claim is true.
The major difference (in my opinion) is that the Old Boys Club owns it. They know they’re not welcoming to women and for the most part they don’t care. But Silicon Valley, for whatever reason, absolutely insists that they’re welcoming and that it’s all in our heads. The Old Boys Club was frustrating but Tech is infuriating.
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That's nonsense. It pays very well and can give you great freedom to set your own path.
I think that poster is referring to STEM as a whole. Software engineering is a small subset of STEM, and I'd argue that it is, surprisingly, both the most accessible and the most lucrative.
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How many engineers are represented in the media in general? Has there been a hit TV show with male engineers as the main character?
How big a hit? Halt and Catch Fire fictionalized a lot but two of the four leads were software and hardware engineers, The Expanse has the primary hardware/software hacker on the ship as one of the four main characters but it's a woman, Person of Interest had two of the four main characters be software programmers, one a man and one a woman, Mr Robot has software developers for most roles besides gangster and law enf…
The examples are legion.