Is there a way to see more of the data? I was curious to see what their data was for tech, but I couldn't find it.
Gender and Career Choice
21–30 of 67 posts
Re: Gender and Career Choice
#22Opportunities to pursue interests != career choice A lot of things are interesting to a lot of people. That does not mean they are competent in it to make it a viable career. In other words, even if I "think" I like something, doesn't mean I'm actually going to thrive in that occupation in the real world. I used to play for local soccer teams. That did not translate to Ronaldo-level paychecks. Another example: I used…
This is perilously close to arguing that women don't do engineering because they're not as smart as men.
Either you're using competence to explain the disparities, or you're not. If you're not, then you need an explanation for the observable interest/career disparities. This is especially true for paths where gender bias is reflected in the low/high career paths within the same field (for example, nurses vs doctors).
And if you're just saying women aren't as smart as men... well.
Re: Gender and Career Choice
#23Opportunities to pursue interests != career choice A lot of things are interesting to a lot of people. That does not mean they are competent in it to make it a viable career. In other words, even if I "think" I like something, doesn't mean I'm actually going to thrive in that occupation in the real world. I used to play for local soccer teams. That did not translate to Ronaldo-level paychecks. Another example: I used…
> I think many women completely miss the point that fairness is just equal opportunity to pursue your interests.
What might be being implied is that women inherently don't have equal opportunity to pursue interests, if a bunch of women are interested and somehow never enter the field in comparison to men who show interest and enter the field in rates according to interest.
Re: Gender and Career Choice
#24This post would be much more informative and useful if similar statistics were included for men. If the porportion interested in a subject, but not entering it (versus the porportion interested and entering it) was higher for one gender than the other, then it would suggest that one gender faced more difficulties in attaining success in that field than the other. If the proportion of one gender with (similar) credent…
This is the only attack-the-methodology critique I've read on this thread that actually makes any sense.
Re: Gender and Career Choice
#25This ignores the fact that discrimination in a career field deters women from being interested in the field to begin with, creating a self-sustaining vicious cycle.
Within broad notions of a career, for example a "career in law" or a "career in medicine", we see much more equal numbers for men and women, but when we look at the jobs women actually have, we see that women occupy low status jobs (like paralegal and nurse) while men occupy high status jobs (like lawyer and doctor), indicating that interest is not a factor in gender gaps for specific professions.
It's disappointing to read hacker news comments on any article related to feminism, and this isn't an exception. The goal of more than a hundred years of feminist struggle isn't to change the rules of society in some arbitrary way so deontological goals are adhered to, but women are not actually equal members of society. The goal is to create an actually equal society. Anything less is a failure, and if you argue for that, you are arguing against feminism.
Re: Gender and Career Choice
#26This post would be much more informative and useful if similar statistics were included for men. If the porportion interested in a subject, but not entering it (versus the porportion interested and entering it) was higher for one gender than the other, then it would suggest that one gender faced more difficulties in attaining success in that field than the other. If the proportion of one gender with (similar) credent…
The article is poorly worded - I misunderstood it initially - but their metric does appear to measure that. It measures how many "likes" a career got from women, and how many women actually work in it. It does not show the absolute number of likes or people working, but the proportion of women out of both.
Re: Gender and Career Choice
#27Completely meaningless statistics without factoring in the experience and education of the people surveyed. It's one thing to say you're interested and another to go through the effort required [0]. I'm interested in being a pilot - but I lack any of the education or credentials to actually become a pilot . So my interest compared to the possibility of employment would be meaningless. How many of the females are inte…
/me sighs Where to start? First, to your (horribly sexist) implication that women opt out of the workforce by studying "Gender or Women's Studies": it isn't even in the top 10 majors for women. You know what the #1 major for women is? Business. http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/02/top-10-college-majors-women... Biology, math, and physics are all also popular majors for women: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/28/…
Don't more women attend college than men?
Hasn't that been true for 40 years?
Re: Gender and Career Choice
#28This post would be much more informative and useful if similar statistics were included for men. If the porportion interested in a subject, but not entering it (versus the porportion interested and entering it) was higher for one gender than the other, then it would suggest that one gender faced more difficulties in attaining success in that field than the other. If the proportion of one gender with (similar) credent…
This is the only attack-the-methodology critique I've read on this thread that actually makes any sense.
Thanks? I am not trying to attack the author, the writing, or the idea; it's just that I don't know what to make of the data they present, because I require some context to understand the situation they are trying to characterize. I do not doubt their dedication, their motives, or their work ethic.
Re: Gender and Career Choice
#29This post would be much more informative and useful if similar statistics were included for men. If the porportion interested in a subject, but not entering it (versus the porportion interested and entering it) was higher for one gender than the other, then it would suggest that one gender faced more difficulties in attaining success in that field than the other. If the proportion of one gender with (similar) credent…
This is the only attack-the-methodology critique I've read on this thread that actually makes any sense.
The others make more sense, actually. They report proportions, so if 40% are women, you know 60% are men. Therefore there is no need to report men. But as I said in another comment, the article is indeed poorly worded and confusing on this.
Re: Gender and Career Choice
#30This post would be much more informative and useful if similar statistics were included for men. If the porportion interested in a subject, but not entering it (versus the porportion interested and entering it) was higher for one gender than the other, then it would suggest that one gender faced more difficulties in attaining success in that field than the other. If the proportion of one gender with (similar) credent…
Similar statistics are included for men. They're reporting male-female split in self reported interest data versus representation in the profession. So the 37.4% for civil engineers in the first chart means that 37.4% of people who "liked" that career were women, but the field has only 16.5% representation of women. You can get the numbers for men just by subtracting those from 100%.