Django Girls one year later • Hacker News Board

Re: Django Girls one year later

#91

Post by yummyfajitas » Sat, Aug 01, 2015, 12:30 PM UTC

Trombone12 wrote: post #81

yummyfajitas wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty of reason to study them; they provide validation/rejection of our theories. If you claim that "power" drives everything, yet fields with no power difference have disparities which directly mirror the disparities you claim are driven by "power", that suggests there is an underlying theory that doesn't use power at all and which predicts more things. By Occams razor, the latter theory is the one which s…

Dude, you can't use Occam’s razor to select between one theory and "the idea of there being a better theory" o_0 Fine, there might be an underlying theory that explains everything better than the "power" theory, BUT YOU HAVE TO PROVIDE IT before you can argue that it is superior.

My theory is very simple: more math less women.

This predicts the % of women in academic physics relative to academic bio, IT relative to HR, and quite a bit more. Anyone who disagrees is welcome to try and find cases where this theory fails to fit the data.

Re: Django Girls one year later

#92

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, Aug 01, 2015, 12:34 PM UTC

sfk wrote: post #85

pron wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you state your theory clearly enough that I can directly apply it? Certainly. Non-hegemonic groups are marginalized from seats of power. After a long struggle, they may increase participation. Put another way: groups with more power tend to preserve and increase the power difference between them and less powerful groups, while the less-powerful groups may gain a share of the power after a struggle. Sadly, it's…

Seats of power? Any woman can start and maintain an OSS project like xterm. They don't, because it's a thankless task and either they aren't interested enough or they figure out the "thankless" part faster than men.

>or they figure out the "thankless" part faster than men //

Or men figure out the "thankless" part equally quickly but aren't as bothered to receive encouragement from others as the women?

Re: Django Girls one year later

#93

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, Aug 01, 2015, 12:38 PM UTC

mozumder wrote: post #2

The slide illustrations are brilliant. Refreshing to see that level of art direction at a tech conference.

You can see the woman's touch! /jk

Re: Django Girls one year later

#94

Post by pron » Sat, Aug 01, 2015, 12:40 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #91

Trombone12 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, you can't use Occam’s razor to select between one theory and "the idea of there being a better theory" o_0 Fine, there might be an underlying theory that explains everything better than the "power" theory, BUT YOU HAVE TO PROVIDE IT before you can argue that it is superior.

My theory is very simple: more math less women. This predicts the % of women in academic physics relative to academic bio, IT relative to HR, and quite a bit more. Anyone who disagrees is welcome to try and find cases where this theory fails to fit the data.

Except it doesn't, unless you squint really, really hard. Finding cases where this theory fails to fit the data is too easy: women participation in physics and math is growing and is far higher than in CS, where it's declining; more women go into biology than into history (women participation in history and physics is quite similar). It also doesn't explain the low women participation in politics (again, similar to or lower than in physics[1][2]).

That you continue to believe this theory despite so much contradictory evidence is perplexing.

Also, it's a bad theory in that it's a description rather than an explanation. Even supposing it fit the data better than it does, why would it be the case that more math = less women? I mean, no one suggests that men are 5x or 8x better at math than women as direct studies clearly show it is not the case. So even if it were a good description (though it isn't) it is not the least bit explanatory. The ultimate explanation of such a theory is still likely to be social.

It is probably true that women, on average, are more empathic than men, and therefore would prefer professions that involve working with others more, but that difference is nowhere near the actual participation rates that we find, so it can't be a major explanation.

A "theory" which fits the data -- on average, of course -- much, much better than yours would be "women choose professions with less money and less prestige". This "theory" is surprisingly predictive because, amazingly enough, women choose to be paid less money than men even while doing the very same job, so it must be right.

[1]: http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/leadership-and-politica...

[2]: https://www.american.edu/spa/wpi/upload/2012-Men-Rule-Report...

Re: Django Girls one year later

#95

Post by yummyfajitas » Sat, Aug 01, 2015, 12:50 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #78

yummyfajitas wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty of reason to study them; they provide validation/rejection of our theories. If you claim that "power" drives everything, yet fields with no power difference have disparities which directly mirror the disparities you claim are driven by "power", that suggests there is an underlying theory that doesn't use power at all and which predicts more things. By Occams razor, the latter theory is the one which s…

> There is plenty of reason to study them; they provide validation/rejection of our theories. That's not always enough to fund sufficient research, especially as those avenues of research show no more promise in uncovering a more fundamental model or validating/rejecting theories better than the ones that are currently explored. > yet fields with no power difference have disparities which directly mirror the disparit…

CS participation was the same or higher than math and physics, and now it's significantly lower.

Yes - and this contradicts belorn's theory.

My theory is very simple: more math less women, with other factors being secondary. Here is Scott Alexander doing some pretty good regressions (r=-0.82, p=0.0003): http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/24/perceptions-of-required...

There is lots of evidence of innate ability playing a significant role in this. Here are some papers:

http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf http://itp.wceruw.org/Hyde%20Science%2008.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3057475/pdf/nihm...

(Note that putting agreement with me into an abstract is career suicide, so you'll actually need to skip ahead to the data tables.)

My theory predicts % of women in academia in bio vs physics, % women in IT office work vs softer office work, % women in quant trading vs back office, and many more. Do you have any evidence at all which contradicts this?

Re: Django Girls one year later

#96

Post by wvh » Sat, Aug 01, 2015, 12:58 PM UTC

I like the way they have written the story without sounding overly accusing. I'm a hardcore coder and security guy, but beyond technical skills I don't really fit into typical IT environments and often plan to leave the business altogether and do something completely different.

There are a lot of men too who find the mono-culture in the industry hard and feel like outsiders. I'm not sure that's helpful to women feeling isolated; but we can hope the industry slowly recognises the problem and learns to attract a more diverse group of people with a more diverse set of skills that will enable a more diverse set of solutions.

Take the graphics in the presentation: in my last project, we struggled (and failed) to find anybody with both technical and artistic skills. People with artistic skills rarely show up for technical jobs it seems, and that's a pity.

Re: Django Girls one year later

#97

Post by yummyfajitas » Sat, Aug 01, 2015, 1:03 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #80

yummyfajitas wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you state your theory clearly enough that I can directly apply it? I have no idea what you are trying to say. Make sure to include a clear definition of "power", and make sure this definition is clear enough that I can at the very least evaluate "more" and "less" power. (I.e., I have no idea why you consider academic physics to have more power than academic biology.) I also have no idea what you mean by "a margin…

> Can you state your theory clearly enough that I can directly apply it? Certainly. Non-hegemonic groups are marginalized from seats of power. After a long struggle, they may increase participation. Put another way: groups with more power tend to preserve and increase the power difference between them and less powerful groups, while the less-powerful groups may gain a share of the power after a struggle. Sadly, it's…

You've only provided one clear definition of "power", namely "influences the behavior of others". This is simply a relation. It is not an ordering or a cardinality. Yet you then turn around and use "power" in an ordinal way ("power difference") and sometimes even a cardinal way.

The definition you give here almost does that, but how do I assign a number to "magnitude in the change of behavior"? You've not defined a "hegemonic group" either.

Anyway, since I can't quite understand your theory, maybe you can clearly state a hypothetical observation which would prove your theory incorrect. That's usually a good way to illustrate what a theory does and does not predict.

For example, to disprove my "more math less women" theory, you should find a broad category of similar careers, run linear regression on math content vs % female, and find a flat or upward sloping line. I.e., the same analysis as was done on Scott Alexander's post (see my link), but with the opposite result.

Re: Django Girls one year later

#98

Post by tomp » Sat, Aug 01, 2015, 1:06 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #90

tomp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see what you want to see. I see plenty of very powerful women (Merkel, Lagarde, Hillary) and countless powerless men. Hint: what the powerful have in common is not sex, but money . If you really wanted to make a better society, you would focus on eradicating that discrimination and gap. But then, that probably won't win you any friends or popularity contests, so I guess I understand why you focus on the low-hangi…

[deleted]

> I see what research has found.

Care to cite it? What about the "Women are wonderful" effect [1]?

I'm not suggesting that women are uniformly privileged compared to men. But neither will I accept that they are uniformly underprivileged. Sexes are treated differently, sure, but IMO to speak about one sex being privileged over the other is to speak from ignorance or agenda.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E2%80%9CWomen_are_wonderful%E...

Re: Django Girls one year later

#99

Post by bayesianhorse » Sat, Aug 01, 2015, 1:11 PM UTC

wisty wrote: post #54

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also the problem that we are talking about certain subsets of badgers and squirrels. Consider that many of the badgers that originally grew the forest that they now enjoy only did so because they were shunned not just by the squirrels, but by many other badgers. Look closely and you'll notice that some of these badgers, or those of the same subgroup, are resistant to both squirrels and other badgers coming i…

Are these squirrels and badgers resistant to other squirrels and badgers coming in, or just resistant to changing their behavior to fit in with the newcomers? And do we really believe that squirrels and badgers are fundamentally that different?

One of the points of the fable as I understood it is that the badgers often aren't actually badgers, but all sorts of other individuals trying to mimic a badger.

Re: Django Girls one year later

#100

Post by bayesianhorse » Sat, Aug 01, 2015, 1:15 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #82

robertfw wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to say that we're all one group if you're in the dominant group...

I hope you're not serious. I'm a geek, mind and body. Most of my life (school, high school, sports, socializing, university) I was part of the marginalized, made fun of, or outright abused groups. Incidentally, many women had it a lot better that I (they were popular, attractive, outgoing, talkative, ...). Just because some of us (programmers) managed to unexpectedly strike gold (in this economy) doesn't make us "dom…

It's not about "dominance in most areas of life" but rather in a team of developers or communities of developers.

Programming is still lucrative enough for most people that they chose this over the job they were originally trained for. That is one of the reasons (and not the only one) women want to be part of such groups, and there they are the minority.

Also my perception is not that development teams are necessarily "dominated" by nerds. It's a cliche which is often wrong.