An alternative argument for why women leave STEM • Hacker News Board

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#531

Post by alfor » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 3:47 AM UTC

henrikschroder wrote: post #423

gowld wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredibly offensive and dumb to say that women don't know how to raise children, considering the millennia long track record.

That millennia long track record contains very high numbers of infant death, and the only thing pushing those numbers down is our ever-expanding collective knowledge of best practices regarding child-rearing. Women aren't born with innate genetic knowledge of how to prevent SIDS, it's taken generations of studies to figure out causes and develop working practices to counter it.

I you put a baby in safe environment and you don't touch it, don't play with it he widdle and die. Think about that for a moment. One thing for sure we were able to reproduce for millennia but let science do it for a while and see what happen.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#532

Post by hanniabu » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 3:47 AM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #498

hanniabu wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably going to get downvoted for this, but how exactly is this sexism? It seems to be just plain old biology.

If it turned out that it was just women’s breasts that caused the disparity... that women who have mastectomies do just fine in Academia, would you consider that to be “case solved, situation normal, plain old biology, no sexism here”? Or would you keep looking for a solution that allows women, who have the very normal female attribute of “having breasts”, to also be catered to and be able to get work done and be com…

Try to think of it more in this way. Men are under-represented in breastfeeding and giving birth. How come we aren't looking for solutions to these issues? It's easy to claim this is plain old biology, not sexism. We need to be looking for solutions that allow women to also contribute to child births and rearing in these ways.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#533

Post by buzzkillington » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 3:50 AM UTC

bjourne wrote: post #508

buzzkillington wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Non-working mothers is a modern anomaly. If by modern you mean common for the lower middle class in 1850 sure: >And here occurs a curious inversion. It is a fact of common observance that in this lower middle class there is no pretense of leisure on the part of the head of the household. Through force of circumstances it has fallen into disuse. But the middle-class wife still carries on the business of vicarious lei…

Are you sure Thorstein Veblen's quote is accurate or applies to the majority of the female population at the time?

https://i.imgur.com/EAS0UGZ.png

The majority of people at the time lived in rural Asia, so anything said about women in the anglosphere applies under 1% of the worlds population.

Traditional societies however had essentially no women working outside the house once they got married if they weren't destitute.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#534

Post by bluecalm » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 3:53 AM UTC

henrikschroder wrote: post #423

gowld wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredibly offensive and dumb to say that women don't know how to raise children, considering the millennia long track record.

That millennia long track record contains very high numbers of infant death, and the only thing pushing those numbers down is our ever-expanding collective knowledge of best practices regarding child-rearing. Women aren't born with innate genetic knowledge of how to prevent SIDS, it's taken generations of studies to figure out causes and develop working practices to counter it.

The only thing? What about progress in medicine and hygiene? SIDS is a very minor factor in child mortality.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#535

Post by username90 » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 3:54 AM UTC

Faark wrote: post #465

uncle_j wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an obvious distinction between people trying to socially arrange society and our biology. Pretending otherwise is ridiculous.

Woman give birth, men cannot breastfeed. That are indeed biology. Kids being picked up from school predominately by woman is a social arrangement, the kind we hopefully at least try to change if we consider there to be better options. But yes, many kinds of social arrangements come up naturally and woman taking care of house and kids seems to be one of them. Another one is "the powerful rule over the weak"... somethi…

Gender norms are partly genetic. Historically women were either breastfeeding or late-stage pregnant their entire adult lives and so to survive they needed men to work, so that is what our gender norms reflect. For example, men who doesn't take care of their women are still seen as scum. Not because there is any need for that any longer, but because our genes tells us that such men are trash and should be shunned. So you wont find any society which doesn't pressure men to become a provider and take care of women.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#536

Post by jstewartmobile » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 3:56 AM UTC

Brand-new planes that crash, bridges that fall on the first day, the subordination of computing to advertising and surveillance, iatrogenics, plastics/xenoestrogens, environmental destruction, species extinction, paper-upon-paper of non-reproducible p-hacked astroturfing, and this crazy over-privileged broad is going to whine technocratically over how her gender isn't proportionally represented in this systematic destruction of nature, beauty, and civilization?

Break out the tiny violins.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#537

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 3:57 AM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #460

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #395

The author is missing the forest for the trees. She argues that a specific kind of sexism (harrassment) is not sufficient to explain why so many women are forced out of their careers in STEM academia. She argues that the real reason is that those women want to start a family and they can't do both at once. She herself is considering leaving academia to start a family (she wants to have two or three children). Yet she…

Probably going to get downvoted for this, but how exactly is this sexism? It seems to be just plain old biology.

How is it biology that only women are expected to leave work to care for children? I don't follow. Is there some biological reason why men are not expected to do the same?

Do you mean something else by the "it" in "It seems to be just plain old biology"?

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#538

Post by dgzl » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 4:01 AM UTC

healsjnr1 wrote: post #512

barry-cotter wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As men in the field we should advocate for those things Karen recommends, namely flexible hours, obscenely convenient high quality childcare, and other supports to make a career not the death of family. Flexible hours impose large costs in terms of increased difficulty of coordination and communication and if you’re really serious about them you need to completely upend the organizational structure, like changing a…

This point of view keeps coming up and it completely misses the point that _this already happens to every single women who has given up their career to look after children_. This flexibility and cost you are talking about is borne entirely by them as they rearrange their lives and attempt to make things work while men continue with barely any disruption. I'm my opinion this is deep, unintentional, structural sexism.…

I'm strongly against abandoning equality for equity, and I don't agree that STEM academia and industry are internally sexist.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#539

Post by pnako » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 4:03 AM UTC

healsjnr1 wrote: post #512

barry-cotter wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As men in the field we should advocate for those things Karen recommends, namely flexible hours, obscenely convenient high quality childcare, and other supports to make a career not the death of family. Flexible hours impose large costs in terms of increased difficulty of coordination and communication and if you’re really serious about them you need to completely upend the organizational structure, like changing a…

This point of view keeps coming up and it completely misses the point that _this already happens to every single women who has given up their career to look after children_. This flexibility and cost you are talking about is borne entirely by them as they rearrange their lives and attempt to make things work while men continue with barely any disruption. I'm my opinion this is deep, unintentional, structural sexism.…

Saying that women give up a career to look after their children is like lamenting the fact that people are giving up drinking to look after their liver.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#540

Post by hinkley » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 4:05 AM UTC

scarejunba wrote: post #301

hinkley wrote: post #87

I can't speak for women, and I'm just smart enough not to try. But what I can say is that I don't hold all of the values that I did as a young man. I'm not excited about the same things, and today I find some of those ideas uncomfortably naive or even off-putting. As I've engaged in more activities, as I've socialized with more people, I've encountered many more ideas and a lot of nuance. Nothing has simple answers a…

It's okay to be jaded, but to present that as coming from wisdom that others are missing is both self-congratulatory and lacking in self-awareness. I think you misrepresent startup founders. Most I've met are generally very smart people and they've read The Remains of the Day too so it's not like they're this nerd-in-the-basement fantasy you get from the movies. The Hollywood fantasy is dead. I'm only saying this so…

It's hard to find the right tone between "things need to change" and "everything is horrible".

Good teamwork is just about my favorite thing (I even prefer co-op games to solo). You might find it, for sure you can build it, and even when you have to work your butt off for it, I think it's still less work than killing yourself 60+ hours a week.