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

Gender and Career Choice

sokanu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 67 posts

Re: Gender and Career Choice

#31

Post by NTDF9 »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #23
NTDF9 wrote: post #12

Opportunities 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.

> 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

Well, most male software engineers in the world aspire to become rich and famous like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Does that mean every single male has equal opportunity to become one?

Women nowadays have full access to all kinds of education, all kinds of scholarships, all kinds of resources (as much as any man). If they don't take those things to pursue their interests, what else can be done?

Are you suggesting women should have a red carpet laid out to enter any field? Why? Where is equality then?

Re: Gender and Career Choice

#32

Post by nickff »

brighteyes wrote: post #26
nickff wrote: post #18

This 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.

You are correct, and I did misunderstand the writing initially. I would still like to see the raw numbers for interest, credentialling, and employment for each gender, but it appears the author tried to boil down the data and make it more easily understood.

Re: Gender and Career Choice

#33

Post by switchbak »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #16
Nadya wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now, whether or not their choice of education (and thus chance of employment) was due to a gender bias or gender discrimination is another question. I later clarified that I don't discard that line of reasoning. E: I will further clarify that I don't personally think this is the case though. Roughly 30% more women are attending tertiary education than men (at least in the US and other "western world" nations) and th…

But is any of that education actually resulting in changes in the income of women and career projections in comparison with equally or less-educated men?

I imagine it will - over a very long term. And I imagine faculties like CS will take even longer to evolve, but will eventually follow the same pattern.

When there's such a divergence in post-secondary attendance (as there apparently is), I think the effects are somewhat unavoidable.

Re: Gender and Career Choice

#34

Post by brighteyes »

oldmanjay wrote: post #20
ackim wrote: post #10

I question the credibility of this article. There are factors missing in this analysis, education for instance. I am also weary of an article based on `self-reported interest.`

Out of curiosity, how would one measure interest without self-reporting? Constant surveillance to make sure women aren't secretly reading Dr Dobbs (RIP) in an incognito browser window while filling their history with TMZ?

You can measure interest more objectively by seeing how many start down a career path, for example. Another measure could be to look at proxies to interest - such as hobby programming as a proxy for interest in computing, or reading books as a proxy for writing.

But, those are much harder to measure than just counting "likes" on a web form.

Re: Gender and Career Choice

#35

Post by brighteyes »

nickff wrote: post #32
brighteyes wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are correct, and I did misunderstand the writing initially. I would still like to see the raw numbers for interest, credentialling, and employment for each gender, but it appears the author tried to boil down the data and make it more easily understood.

I am also worried about normalization. Perhaps men like more careers overall, for example? Seeing the raw numbers would clarify if that is a confounding factor or not.

Re: Gender and Career Choice

#36

Post by batbomb »

rcoder wrote: post #7
Nadya wrote: post #2

Completely 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/…

As someone who majored in Physics and minored in Math, there was quite a bit of women in the Math department and a few women in Physics, but both had much more women than the entry level CS class I took, and I'm not sure there were any that I can remember in the one, large, entry-level EE class I took.

I did graduate 2008/2009, and tried to find a job for a while without much luck, partially because employers were (short-sightedly) specifically looking for EE/CS degrees.

That's where I think the second part of this problem lies: Majoring in math and physical sciences, specifically with only a BS, doesn't get you very far in a job market when even entry level positions are heavily favoring CS and EE degrees... even though most STEM degrees usually share a common pedigree of math, sciences, and basic programming skills. In many cases, students who are able to do any kind of research as an undergrad in math or physical sciences will have quite adequate and advanced programming skills, but that's still harder to market than a engineering degree.

Re: Gender and Career Choice

#37

Post by rayiner »

Nadya wrote: post #2

Completely 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…

I majored in aerospace engineering at a pretty good state school. My major was probably 10% women. However, if you look at the pool of people with a 700+ SAT Math score, which was pretty representative of my classmates, it's over 35%. And apparently, the interest among women in mechanical engineering is up around that too.

So where did those women who are good at math and interested in being engineers go? I think a lot of them make the sensible decision to go into careers where they won't spend the rest of their lives fighting an uphill battle as a minority.

Re: Gender and Career Choice

#38

Post by rubergly »

In case it wasn't obvious, the word "female" is an adjective, and referring to a group of people by an adjective instead of a noun has a demeaning connotation in English, especially when it's primarily used for one group and not another.

Notice how the word "male" is only mentioned in this article as an adjective ("male/female mix", "male/female interests"), but "females" is often used as a synonym for "women" ("% of females", "people likely to trust females", "females in career", "likes from females"). "Female" is not a drop-in replacement for "women".

> Using "female" in this way is contrary to how we generally communicate. As noted above, "female" as a noun erases the subject—making "female" the subject of the sentence. In the most technical sense, it's correct, but by employing this word that is usually an adjective as a noun, you're reducing her whole personhood to the confines of that adjective. It's calling someone "a white" instead of a white person, "a black" instead of a black person, and so on.[0]

Not really trying to judge this article—it's been a while since I've dealt with research jargon, and I can't judge whether referring to groups as adjectives like this is standard practice in that field. And the Jezebel article I've linked to even mentions that "females" has a clinical feel, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's standard in this setting. But this bias is pretty prevalent in everyday speech and is worth being aware of and trying to prevent.

[0]: http://jezebel.com/the-problem-with-calling-women-females-16...

Re: Gender and Career Choice

#39

Post by NTDF9 »

beat wrote: post #22
NTDF9 wrote: post #12

Opportunities 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).…

>> This is perilously close to arguing that women don't do engineering because they're not as smart as men.

Smart is the wrong word. It gives the analysis a different connotation. I think the word we are looking for is aptitude.

Among men, there are many who have the aptitude to do STEM. Then there are other men who don't....and that is fine.

I think the same goes for women. Many women have the aptitude...but many don't.

>> 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).

I am using competence. And competence is not just inherent. Competence is developed. This is called schooling.

A lot of girls spend their teen ages trying to look good and be popular(mostly because of social expectations and peer pressure). They buckle under that pressure and choose to not study as their nerdy-male counterparts.

When they grow up, the nerdy-males get into high-flying jobs/careers while the females struggle to compete with them in the real world. That's why interest != competence

It takes work. Nobody stopped those women from pursuing the hard stuff. They did it to themselves. You can't have everything. Nobody can. Not even men.

Re: Gender and Career Choice

#40

Post by beat »

rayiner wrote: post #37
Nadya wrote: post #2

Completely 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…

I majored in aerospace engineering at a pretty good state school. My major was probably 10% women. However, if you look at the pool of people with a 700+ SAT Math score, which was pretty representative of my classmates, it's over 35%. And apparently, the interest among women in mechanical engineering is up around that too. So where did those women who are good at math and interested in being engineers go? I think a l…

A sad and worrisome trend over the past few decades has been fewer rather than more women in engineering fields (especially computers). I haven't seen well-researched explanations for this, but it's a measurable and observable phenomenon.
Post reply on HN