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The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

theatlantic.com

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Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#111

Post by [deleted] »

dalbasal wrote: post #103
dvt wrote: post #2

Equality of opportunity does not necessarily imply equality of outcome . This isn't a paradox. Why are still people still confused about this? (Actually, people aren't confused about this, but it makes for great clickbait articles and ad revenue because it fans the flames of both sides of the argument.)

Let's assume we're not all disingenious a----les, trying for clickbait and gotchas, but still disagree on some points. I would say that you're right, and this means that specific outcome equality is not indicative of equality of opportunity. But, it's also true that equality before the law and other measures that have been tKe over the last 3 generations do not guarantee equality of opportunity. Opportunity is in its…

[deleted]

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#113

Post by hackpert »

mpweiher wrote: post #102
hackpert wrote: post #60

Whenever such studies or analyses come up in the media, I find that people are often eager to jump to causative conclusions on the lines of "oh females must have a natural inclination towards 'softer' fields" or (as in case of this article) "In wealthy nations, they believe that they have the freedom to pursue those alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less." However, even if we ignore the obvious correla…

We don't have to go to claiming a specific cause. The simple fact is that if your claim is that discrimination is the primary cause for the lack of representation of women in STEM fields, then these data show that you are wrong. Not because we can eliminate subtle pressures with 100% certainty, we don't need to do that. The hypothesis is wrong because it makes the wrong prediction: if discrimination were the major ca…

Sure, this question definitely deserves further probing for other causative factors. But about discrimination, what stage are we talking about? During early childhood when males tend to be pushed towards mechanical toys and construction sets, and females towards caring for dolls? During university when you're repeatedly singled out as the token female in a STEM class by the professor? At the workplace? Discrimination can exist independently at multiple stages and these data only talk about equality on some levels, and that too only overt discrimination. I'm not saying it is (or is not) the primary cause, but it may be too early to rule it out entirely.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#114

Post by nukeop »

zerr wrote: post #14

One reason could be - in poor/developing countries STEM is understood as the escape path from the poverty, while in developed countries people seem assured in their future even if they go in humanities or any other non-tech field - thus following their interests/hobbies rather than the need. EDIT: unintentional tl;dr as it seems :)

This could be true, assuming USA is a poor/developing country.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#115

Post by nukeop »

soVeryTired wrote: post #86

If you look closely at their scatter plot, you can see that the UAE, Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia cluster in the lower right. Without them, the relationship would be considerably weaker. Is there something in particular about Middle Eastern culture that's skewing the results? I'm not sure I understand the choice of countries in the regression either. Where are India and China, for example?

What could be so particular about the Middle Eastern culture that would result in a different treatment of women in these countries? Is it about the climate? Is it about the diet? The research must continue to resolve this mindboggling mystery.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#116

Post by YouAreGreat »

cm2187 wrote: post #76
dvt wrote: post #2

Equality of opportunity does not necessarily imply equality of outcome . This isn't a paradox. Why are still people still confused about this? (Actually, people aren't confused about this, but it makes for great clickbait articles and ad revenue because it fans the flames of both sides of the argument.)

One of the many simplifications in this debate. Another one: if someone is arguing that there is a difference in the distribution of a particular character between men and women. Immediatly I read comments jumping to the conclusion “my god it says women are more/less [whatever] than men”, as in “all women”. Lots of people seem to be incapable of thinking in term of distributions, which makes it really hard to have an…

> Lots of people seem to be incapable of thinking in term of distributions, which makes it really hard to have any discussion.

Most people seem very capable of thinking statistically, but they don't communicate in distributions.

For two people communicating in good faith, the two statements (1) "Boys are taller than girls" and (2) "Anne is taller than Sean" don't prompt talk about how both can't be true at the same time, sexist. People communicate statistical differences as "absolutes", but when communicating in good faith, everybody knows what everybody means.

Look at stereotype research. Most stereotypes are statistically true. People communicate them "as if" absolute, but nobody's head explodes when individual examples don't "conform" to the stereotype. That's because people can think in distributions.

That's not surprising, it's how to survive in a stochastic environment.

This gap between thought and speech only becomes problematic ("makes it really hard to have any discussion") because we can rhetorically exploit the fact that most people can't explicitly communicate about distributions. Just tell them they're bigoted, and they don't know how to refute you. Yay, you win.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#117

Post by HappyDreamer »

lsy wrote: post #50

Drawing conclusions about "innate" differences between men and women from this data doesn't seem valid. There's a lot of research left to eliminate confounding effects on participation that aren't covered or investigated by the "Global Gender Gap Index" (e.g. cultural attitudes towards women in STEM, or on-the-job discrimination). Scatter-plotting two datasets available on the internet doesn't feel like enough resear…

No. After having removed outliers, I still see a clear line & slope like shown in the diagram. Maybe you don't see it, because you don't want to see it?

Also, you cannot call all of Sweden, Norway and Finland "outliers"? To me, that looks more like you deliberately destroying data, until the remaining data set fits your world view. Hmm I live in Scandinavia and I feel mildly annoyed that you apparently want to ignore this part of the world :- P

Women breast feed babies. To me it's natural and obvious that evolution has therefore made them feel happy when they take care of others, and that a bit more women like working as doctors, nurses, psychiatrists and such things.

(With that said, I think it's a good idea to encourage more women to choose STEM jobs. The article seems to agree with this and that they're good at it.)

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#118

Post by sharpneli »

RyanZAG wrote: post #49
ekianjo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a free market such companies would be at disadvantage versus the ones who also attract top talent regardless of gender or race or any other demographic criteria whatsoever.

That's assuming an internal company culture couldn't be created based on shared understanding that would lead to competitive advantage. Eg, if you create a company with only black women, you may not necessarily get the very best individuals, but you could create a very unique culture. That culture could empower the whole team to work better with each other with the end result being a more productive team even though…

I tend to use a simple method to analyze a post. Switch the races and genders around.

If in your post one would switch the term black woman into white man it would become "If you create a company with only white men.... you could create a very unique culture.". etc

That kind of post would cause a massive uproar for rather obvious reasons.

Yet it's interesting that these kind of posts don't.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#119

Post by ZeroGravitas »

guitarbill wrote: post #109
mamon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most diversity programs state 50/50 man/women ratio as their goal, which, according to the article is counterproductive.

Counterproductive for what? Individual happiness? Yeah, maybe. But that's not the only possibility. 50/50 is the "goal", but what's the motivation? Let's assume that we're talking increase in people, i.e. you want more women in STEM/tech/whatever, not simply less men (for some reason this option is rarely mentioned. You could fire enough men to get to 50/50, mathematically that's equally valid). Say I wanted more qua…

Another, less paranoid, motivation to consider, some might argue that STEM is important to civilization and having more of it is a good thing, even if people could go into other careers that are more personally lucrative, but are more zero-sum in their potential for benefitting the human race. Making the pie bigger rather than fighting for the biggest slice of a diminished pie.

Re: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM

#120

Post by TuringTest »

mpweiher wrote: post #92
rectang wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women get paid less than men for doing the same work, across all industries. Pay them the same and the "confusion" will diminish.

This is a common talking point of the dominant narrative but simply not true. When you average all women and all men, you get a "gap". However, like the imbalance in fields, this is almost entirely due to different choices. When you control for factors such as field, hours worked, years worked the gap effectively disappears.

Yeah, isn't it wonderful that when you factor out the discriminating variables, discrimination all but disappears?

Choices made by women are influenced by the glass ceiling, society expectations that women will take care of children and the elderly, and the traditional fields where they're expected to work. The decision to measure the gender gap by comparing equal working hours and equal job positions is not innocent, is itself a politically motivated and comforting way to make rational people think "I told you, there's nothing to see here". You need to evaluate what causes women to have those less hours in less paying jobs, to see whether there's discrimination or not.

Yet the salary wages discrimination reappears when you factor in hours dedicated to domestic work (the "second shift"), differences in salary between fields with equal risks (exposition to chemicals, hardship) where workers are majority women vs those with more men, or companies' (irrational) tendency to default in promoting male workers over females in similar situations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/women-...

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