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Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

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Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#111
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As expected, this is the top comment on an article practically built for this argument. It may very well be that men and women have different criteria, but that is completely irrelevant, and I find this line of argumentation very frustrating as it completely ignores the actual complaints at hand. Women in STEM complain that they have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions. Many women feel they a…

Claiming that men and women just have different criteria, and thus the problem should be ignored entirely completely misses the point. Can you read at all? OP did not say anything like that

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Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#112

I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers, and artificially forcing the distributions towards the middle might do more harm than good.

As expected, this is the top comment on an article practically built for this argument. It may very well be that men and women have different criteria, but that is completely irrelevant, and I find this line of argumentation very frustrating as it completely ignores the actual complaints at hand. Women in STEM complain that they have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions. Many women feel they a…

This comment most closely represents what women friends in tech have expressed to me consistently. I'd like to point out that even if it were agreed upon that women were less interested in STEM careers in aggregate, it would still be valuable to improve this situation for the women who are interested in STEM careers.

Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#113
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This data entirely negates that claim. In countries with the highest levels of gender equality, where women are least likely to experience any of these negative forces, they simply self-select not to participate in certain fields (on average). If you cannot participate in a field where not enough of the people look and act like you, then perhaps you have the problem.

> In countries with the highest levels of gender equality, where women are least likely to experience any of these negative forces The data does not support correlating those two. "Gender equality" in this report refers to the factors in Table 1 at http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2016/mea... , which is about things like life expectancy and number of female politicians and salary - not about disres…

> not about disrespect, unrightful criticism, and scrutiny in technical fields on the basis of sex.

Well since these are claims you can undoubted produce data that all of these issues are significant across the entire field?

Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#114

I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers, and artificially forcing the distributions towards the middle might do more harm than good.

As expected, this is the top comment on an article practically built for this argument. It may very well be that men and women have different criteria, but that is completely irrelevant, and I find this line of argumentation very frustrating as it completely ignores the actual complaints at hand. Women in STEM complain that they have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions. Many women feel they a…

>Women in STEM complain that they have less job prospects and feel uncomfortable in their positions. Many women feel they are disrespected, unrightfully criticized, and scrutinized to a degree unlike their male counterparts.

A lot of the girls I meet in tech tell me stories of positive discrimination. One even said she didn't take a higher paid job because she didn't want it offered to her just because she was a woman (I believe the interviewer said that was why they offered it).

I didn't hear these kinds of stories 5 years ago but I do now.

It all kind of makes me a bit uneasy - I'm not sure this newfound enthusiasm for companies biasing hiring specifically to women is actually making things better for women in tech.

Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#115
post #97
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have observed a female student, super talented in math/programming (IMO/ICPC), to choose finances instead, as a teacher (male) was once saying to her that programming/math don't pay well and have low prestige and finances give easier, secure life. I can't say I had much sympathies to her choice after that, experiencing first time typical female stereotypes about mostly caring about money.

Most people care mostly about money. If the only reason you didn't appreciate her making that choice was because she was a woman, then you are sexist

I was upset she was wasting her talent going purely after money (she was a winner of math/programming competitions). And men are often way more idealistic, willing to endure hardships for ideas instead of cashing out whenever possible. She ended up programming in the end due to job market, but could have achieved way more than working for Accenture-type companies on BS assignments.

Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#116
Whenever thinking of gender equality, I like to go back to Beauvoir. plato.stanford.edu's page [1] is fantastic, here's an extract:

"Before The Second Sex, the sexed/gendered body was not an object of phenomenological investigation. Beauvoir changed that. Her argument for sexual equality takes two directions. First, it exposes the ways that masculine ideology exploits the sexual difference to create systems of inequality. Second, it identifies the ways that arguments for equality erase the sexual difference in order to establish the masculine subject as the absolute human type. Here Plato is her target. Plato, beginning with the premise that sex is an accidental quality, concludes that women and men are equally qualified to become members of the guardian class. The price of women’s admission to this privileged class, however, is that they must train and live like men. Thus the discriminatory sexual difference remains in play. Only men or those who emulate them may rule. Beauvoir’s argument for equality does not fall into this trap. She insists that women and men treat each other as equals and that such treatment requires that their sexual differences be validated. Equality is not a synonym for sameness." (emphasis mine)

I find this paragraph particularly well written, but watch out, I've had an american writer read it and he understood the opposite of what is written. I had to make him read it again ^^

I don't know if it applies to this particular statistics. My personal interpretation of Beauvoir is that yes, this stat does make sense. In a gender equal society, you shouldn't find equal ratios everywhere because du-hu, we're actually not the same. But we should be equal.

That being said, I don't like talking about these things because I generalize to much, and the question is way too complex for me to approach. I like reading other people's take on it though. Anyway, I just wanted to share Beauvoir's thoughts and my rough interpretation of it in this context.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/

Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#117

I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers, and artificially forcing the distributions towards the middle might do more harm than good.

> I wonder if it's possible that men and women, on average, have differing criteria for choosing careers Not only is this true, it has been fairly exhaustively researched. > Cross-cultural consistency of sex differences for four traits: extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and male-versus-female-typical occupational preferences. Men and women differed on all four traits. 200,000 participants from 53 nations. > O…

That paper doesn't provide evidence for a biological basis for occupational preferences (which was an online BBC survey for a TV show "Secrets of the Sexes," asking people to self-report how interested they were in 10 professions, many of which are strongly culturally gendered or "male-versus-female-typical" as the author puts it). It seems pretty likely that there's a biological basis for differences in base personality traits and a cultural basis for careers and gender norms; the fact that the author found that sex predicts three personality traits and one career preference isn't really an argument that all four of them are biological.

(Also I don't think a single paper counts as "exhaustively researched")

Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#118
Not sure if this has been posted on HN before but I think this is a much more interesting article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...

tl;dr Girls tend to be more well rounded intellectually, with both strong math skills and strong verbal skills, giving them more options, possibly more lucrative options, beyond just STEM. Boys tend to be more lacking in verbal skills limiting their options.

A closely related theory is that girls outperform boys in both sciences and humanities, in HS, but they outperform boys in humanities by a much larger margin, and therefore see themselves as strongest in those subjects.

Re: Countries with more gender equality have fewer female STEM grads

#120
post #5

> Girls also tended to register a lower interest in science subjects. These differences were near-universal across all the countries and regions studied. So girls are less interested in these subjects, but in more unequal countries (read poorer) they do it for career prospects, while in more equal countries (read richer) they do what they want (not STEM subjects).

Do you know at what age they checked that? I've seen prior research that suggests that the disinterest in stem appears in middle or high school, and isn't statistically significant before then.

This would heavily imply some level of social conditioning to be the cause for disinterest.

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