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An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

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Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#101

Post by jsprogrammer »

voltagex_ wrote: post #98
jsprogrammer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YC is still stuck in a world of ideas based on controlling others through the creation of debt and claiming lifetime ownership of others' work. That they are stuck there is not entirely unsurprising, nor is it unsurprising that there is a forming gender-class that is trying to emulate the functioning of that world. To me, continuing to carry out these decade[century, millennium?]-long ideas is not very world-changing…

> I'm still not quite sure if this is slavery or just tribal exculsivism. I don't know, maybe it's both? The fuck? It's a nice anecdote about winning some money for what is ostensibly a charity!

To be fair, I didn't hear the original anecdote. I'm only going off of the words in the post I responded to, but making people take an action to better your financial position is slavery.

From the description, the people being coerced could presumably choose not to take the action, but would then be denied entry to the bar. That is explicit tribalism and creates a situation where you either join along with the groupthink or you get cast back on to the streets.

Edit: If you can't refute or contribute, down-vote.

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#102

Post by tzs »

She mentions her field of STEM (mechanical engineering) has a particularly low percentage of women among its members, and cites another site. On that site, there is this interesting list:

   39% of chemists and material scientists are women;
   27.9% of environmental scientists and geoscientists are women;
   15.6% of chemical engineers are women;
   12.1% of civil engineers are women;
   8.3% of electrical and electronics engineers are women;
   17.2% of industrial engineers are women; and
   7.2% of mechanical engineers are women.
Does anyone have an explanation as to why chemists and material scientists have such a relatively high percentage of women?

The two highest are science, as opposed to engineering, so it could be that science in general is more women friendly than engineering, but even if we just look at the engineering disciplines on that list, there still is a big difference among them. Why would chemical engineering be much more women friendly than mechanical engineering?

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#103

Post by crazy1van »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #79
tptacek wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more truth-y than true. If occupational prestige drove employment, we'd all be firefighters. And, of course, when you actually look at occupational prestige figures, engineers crush lawyers. Really, there's no axis on which your hypothesis explains anything.

Which explains why politics - which by definition is full of people who have enough status to set national policy - is full of engineers, while the lawyers are left discussing the finer technical points of voir dire on Lawyer News.

Or politics is filled with lawyers because most politicians are legislators and their main job is to pass laws...

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#104

Post by ameister14 »

tomp wrote: post #41
lambda wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, when I looked around a bit I found this article " rel="nofollow">http://readwrite.com/2014/09/02/women-in-computer-science-wh... which links to this study: " rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/09/11/220748057/why-wome... which indicates that rather than being based on prestige, it appears that the disparity can be broken down based on more rewarding but lower paying, vs. more purely mercenary jo…

You can't compare being a teacher with a career in "law, medicine, politics, or finance" or a programmer. The latter all require very high intellectual aptitude, either logical/mathematical (programming, finance), memory (medicine, law) or social intelligence (finance, politics). In contrast, mostly everybody can be a teacher (and according to comment [1], teachers usually come from the bottom of their class). [1] ht…

You don't have to be that smart to be a programmer, and it takes less schooling than being a teacher requires.

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#105

Post by crazy1van »

tzs wrote: post #102

She mentions her field of STEM (mechanical engineering) has a particularly low percentage of women among its members, and cites another site. On that site, there is this interesting list: 39% of chemists and material scientists are women; 27.9% of environmental scientists and geoscientists are women; 15.6% of chemical engineers are women; 12.1% of civil engineers are women; 8.3% of electrical and electronics engineer…

Maybe women on average just prefer some jobs more than others?

Really, I'm sure there are millions of factors that enter into to those stats -- about one for every woman because everyone woman is unique with her own goals and tastes -- but I think the occam's razor for this topic is that men and women on average have different preferences. Would we be hunting for a root cause in social pressure or discrimination if we found women were a much higher chunk of the audience for Twilight and men were a higher percent of Avengers viewers?

The bottom line, whatever the reason for discrepancies, is in your daily professional life to treat both sexes the equally.

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#106

Post by [deleted] »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #96
tptacek wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I'm saying you constructed it this way intentionally, but this argument is the rhetorical equivalent of one of those Highlights For Children "How Many Things Can You Spot Wrong With This Picture" puzzles; including, at least: * The notion that politicians occupy high-status careers * The notion that it's the status held by politicians that is the reason they're allowed to set national policy * The notion tha…

Your primary failure was confusing personal popularity with social popularity with status/agency/influence. You're - mostly - continuing to make the same mistake. Of course status is defined by caste power and social agency. What else would it be defined by? Facebook likes? The fact that no one much likes lawyers is irrelevant. So is the fact that lawyers individually may fail to make a living from lawyering, or even…

[deleted]

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#107

Post by bsilvereagle »

ffn wrote: post #37
chaostheory wrote: post #5

"I’ve lived my life in a 'man’s world', receiving a degree in mechanical engineering—which contains the lowest percentage of women compared to any other engineering field at just 7.2%—from an already male-dominated university." Going on a tangent, I suspect areas like mechanical engineering and computer science are still "boy's clubs" due to one thing: social prestige. I feel that women are more attracted to high pre…

Mechanical engineering graduate (and 2nd rate programmer) here. And I completely agree, this major is a sinkhole. Maybe 50 years ago when we were still building rockets, planes, and cars to stop the Soviets or what have you, ME was a great major (and maybe 40 years from now when fusion, Mars, and warp drive are all real it will be again). But today in an age of electronics and software, ME is an awful choice for anyo…

That's an interesting point of view. I've had multiple people tell me they wish they could find a 'traditional mechanical engineer' that knew heat transfer, knew fluids, could build a gear train, and knew some kinematics. I think MEs that graduated 20-30 years ago are in high demand.

Extremely watered down versions of those courses are in my curriculum. Fluid mechanics is nearly all Bernoulli's Equation and Linear Momentum. Heat Transfer is 1D conduction, basic convection, and basic radiation. Machine Design, while heavily focused on gears, was extremely watered down. Kinematics, on the other hand, has been completely dropped from the curriculum! A lot of these courses have been made easier to allow students to spend time on 'lab projects' that consist of filling in the blanks of Arduino sketches. It's a sad state of affairs.

You are spot on by stating that undergraduate ME curriculums are 'Engineering Undeclared' in my experience. I think part of this is because the 'traditional' curriculum that my grandfather and father took is 'too challenging' by today's standards. I'm not half the engineer they were when they graduated from the same department.

I think this can be attributed to several things. When my father graduated, everyone took the FE with plans of becoming a PE. I know maybe 5 other people in my graduating class who plan on taking the FE. He took 3 years of math, I took one and a half. We can't really get into 2D conduction in heat transfer because no one has the math background to handle it! The 'Intermediate Heat Transfer' I'm taking in grad school is the equivalent of the 'Introduction to Heat Transfer' my grandfather took.

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#109

Post by ankey1 »

tzs wrote: post #102

She mentions her field of STEM (mechanical engineering) has a particularly low percentage of women among its members, and cites another site. On that site, there is this interesting list: 39% of chemists and material scientists are women; 27.9% of environmental scientists and geoscientists are women; 15.6% of chemical engineers are women; 12.1% of civil engineers are women; 8.3% of electrical and electronics engineer…

Chemistry is often seen as a "softer" science out of the others on the list with supposedly more work/life balance. That was how it was explained to me as a woman when I declared that I was going to study electrical engineering in college. A lot of people tried to steer me towards chemical engineering but I was horrible at chemistry and my interests were more aligned with electrical engineering so I stuck with it.

Re: An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference

#110

Post by kansface »

tzs wrote: post #102

She mentions her field of STEM (mechanical engineering) has a particularly low percentage of women among its members, and cites another site. On that site, there is this interesting list: 39% of chemists and material scientists are women; 27.9% of environmental scientists and geoscientists are women; 15.6% of chemical engineers are women; 12.1% of civil engineers are women; 8.3% of electrical and electronics engineer…

Women make up about 50% of undergrad chemistry degrees. On the other hand, they make less than 20% of physics/math degrees (engineering funnels). I don't have any real idea why women are so low in math and physics, but I suspect you'd have to look back much further in time.
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