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Martin Fowler: The Fallacies and Reprocussions of Diversity Imbalance

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Re: Martin Fowler: The Fallacies and Reprocussions of Diversity Imbalance

#131

Post by bermanoid »

dgabriel wrote: post #55
mhartl wrote: post #43

Although it's easy to become accustomed to it, it's pretty obvious the child care world has some serious issues in diversity. By this I mean that it has some notable differences in proportions of people compared to the general population. One of the most obvious differences is the low proportion of men, which is true all over the world. In the US, where I spend a good chunk of my time, the over-representation of Lati…

Your rewrite is completely valid. Were you expecting it to be absurd? It's not. The same interesting questions arise. I'm sure you can come up with reasons why men may choose not to make their living caring for children, even though they'd prefer to do so. Is this not a problem we should attempt to fix?

Your rewrite is completely valid. Were you expecting it to be absurd? It's not. The same interesting questions arise.

I think the point is, that when "women in tech" comes up, the default assumption that people (particularly feminists) tend to jump to is that sexism is keeping women out of tech. More specifically, that sexist guys in tech are keeping women out. Even when not stated explicitly, this accusation has been made many, many times, and underlies every discussion about this topic.

But the immediate assumption when it comes to nursing is almost never that women in nursing programs mistreat men. In fact, I've almost never heard that accusation, even though it's considered the null hypothesis when it comes to "women in tech". People are much quicker to look for other explanations, for instance that men are more likely to be bothered by the working conditions, pay, autonomy, etc. than women are.

I'm sure you can come up with reasons why men may choose not to make their living caring for children, even though they'd prefer to do so. Is this not a problem we should attempt to fix?

Absolutely, we should address these problems. First we need to know what they are, though, and I think the discussion about this topic has been much more productive in nursing than it has been in tech, because sexism is not considered the null hypothesis there.

Re: Martin Fowler: The Fallacies and Reprocussions of Diversity Imbalance

#132

Post by roguecoder »

MartinCron wrote: post #29
monochromatic wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a problem?

It's only a problem if you care about things like injustice, inefficiency, and wasted potential.

Or want to hire new college grads for your start up for less than $80,000 a year.

Re: Martin Fowler: The Fallacies and Reprocussions of Diversity Imbalance

#133

Post by shallowwater »

jcoglan wrote: post #111
shallowwater wrote: post #89

[reads all the comments about how no one wants ladies in their field anyway] And people wonder why the ladies don't want to hang out with you kids all day. Could it be that ladies are smart enough to figure out when and where they are unwelcome? UNPOSSIBLE signed, a lady who is interested in programming

This needs to be at the top of the thread, rather than all the formal-logic-obsessed debate-club navel-gazing currently sitting there.

Thank you for your kind words. I confess that I am completely taken aback that in 2012 there are still people postulating that women are not capable of or inclined toward intellectually rigorous or difficult work.

Oh those ladies and their feeble, overheating lady-brains!

Re: Martin Fowler: The Fallacies and Reprocussions of Diversity Imbalance

#134

Post by ArbitraryLimits »

roguecoder wrote: post #128
ArbitraryLimits wrote: post #13

I was under the impression that most people had accepted that the reason more men than women do software development is that more men find it interesting than women do, not because women are less intelligent or because there's a conspiracy to keep them out. Too bad, I guess not. As an aside, my boss at the moment is a woman, and a few years ago she had to staff up significantly and hired several young women at the ju…

No. At least, I've certainly seen no research suggesting that is true; you may believe it but "most" people don't and if they did they haven't provided evidence for that belief. If your hypothesis is correct, how do you explain the massive variation over time in gender gap even just in the United States? (citation: http://phrogram.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/CommunityS... )

If you're talking about the sharp decline in computer science degrees granted to women around 1984, I have a couple of guesses.

First, no one really knew what kind of career path getting a computer science degree entailed until around then anyway, and once women had figured it out they decided they didn't want it.

Second, in my opinion women are much more sensitive to their career's stability and predictability than men are, for the simple reason that they're the ones who have to plan out when to have children. You'll notice that the drop-off more or less coincided with the first (or second, or maybe third - I forget which) big bust in the PC industry in the 80s. Mainframes and even microcomputers did not have boom-and-bust cycles like PCs did in the 80s, although individual companies might blow up the industry as a whole was relatively stable. College students looking for stability around that time might sensibly decide "computing" wasn't for them any more.

My favorite reference in this discussion (well, about women in science and engineering as a whole) is Philip Greenspun's article (http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science) who basically makes the argument that the median scientist who doesn't win Noble Prizes actually has a pretty crappy career and that women are smart enough to stay away.

Re: Martin Fowler: The Fallacies and Reprocussions of Diversity Imbalance

#135

Post by drumdance »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #52
cturner wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was told I'd never be a programmer because I didn't get good marks in math and physics, that was sixteen years ago. Let's kill the myth. I can't see any reason why being genuinely good at math is more important to effective programming than being good at chemistry (layers and sequence), biology (complex systems) or languages (building meaning from abstract or incomplete signals). You do not need to be good at late…

I can't see any reason why being genuinely good at math is more importnat to effective programming... I would strongly suspect that just as math and CS ability are correlated, so would math and chemistry. Biology less so, since biology is mostly just memorizing (at least for the first 3-4 years of college). Anyway, I cited math data mainly because it's so widely studied. I get so many downvotes when I discuss this to…

Music and computer programming are correlated as well. Once upon a time orchestras were overwhelmingly male, but now there are a lot more women in orchestras, not to mention world-class soloists. This is partly due to the blind audition process that became common ~40 years ago.

Re: Martin Fowler: The Fallacies and Reprocussions of Diversity Imbalance

#136

Post by davidadsit »

mlncn wrote: post #105

http://www.slideshare.net/terriko/how-does-biology-explain-t...

Since is it fairly common to hear mention of Asperger's syndrome in reference to software developers, I went out and found this study: http://www.la-press.com/gender-ratios-in-autism-asperger-syn...

It turns out that there is a 12:1 ratio of males to females with the Asperger's diagnosis.

I wonder if the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders in males contributes to behaviors that might give one an advantage in the software development field? It only takes a quick reading of the characteristics of the disorder to see that many of them are common among software developers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome

Of course, there are exceptions and I don't mean to imply that one cannot create good software without these characteristics. I only suggest that perhaps these characteristics provide some advantage in a field that is young and constantly changing.

Re: Martin Fowler: The Fallacies and Reprocussions of Diversity Imbalance

#137

Post by bermanoid »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #3

I hate to pick apart Fowler -- probably a good way for folks to call me an idiot -- but I have to. here are (roughly) 50% women in the world, so we should expect the ratio for women in computing to be 50% - unless there's real evidence that some other ratio is natural.[2] So far there's no such evidence. But, er, doesn't the observation that the actual ratio is different evidence constitute "evidence"? Aside from dir…

But, er, doesn't the observation that the actual ratio is different evidence constitute "evidence"?

Fowler's point is that lopsided ratios existed many times in the past, and people argued that they were natural, but they turned out not to be, as was proven when the barriers were torn down and the ratios equalized. So in that sense, he's arguing that ratio observations do not count as "evidence" in this context.

However, what he's overlooking is the fact that in most cases, those imbalanced ratios in the past were buttressed by direct barriers to entry - women and minorities were usually actively excluded, and then when the active discrimination stopped, things started to equalize, often very rapidly (the "Jackie Robinson" effect).

We have seen this happen in most fields (tech has just about the worst gender imbalance in any field apart from nursing). And now we're at a point where explicit barriers to entry are all but absent. So as time goes on, the observation that the ratios are not approaching 1:1 in tech suggests more and more strongly that there's something else going on, and that the methods used to create parity in other fields (fighting -isms, mainly) are not addressing the root cause of inequality in tech.

That's not to say that this is evidence that there's not some other sort of more subtle discrimination going on; that's certainly possible, and I'm open to evidence that something in tech is somehow worse than in other fields (I've never seen any numbers to suggest this, and when looking at data like salary gaps, tech appears to be more equal than most fields). But it does mean that we should be wary about drawing the same causal conclusions that we drew 60 years ago when the situation was very different...

Re: Martin Fowler: The Fallacies and Reprocussions of Diversity Imbalance

#138

Post by bermanoid »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #78
keithflower wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The January 2012 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society presents a comprehensive review article disagreeing that there is "plenty of evidence" women are less likely to be very good at math based on "natural causes" (whatever the hell that kind of nonsense phrase is supposed to mean), and provides plenty of evidence that any disparity is due to attitudes toward women and other sociocultural factors:…

Did you read the article? It agrees completely with the data I cited. It shows a variance ratio of 1.1-1.2 across many countries (though not all). Interestingly, it also shows very little correlation between gender equity and gender disparities in math performance. The strongest correlation it shows is that gender equity is positively correlated with math performance disparities! Gender equity seems to increase [1] m…

Just an additional FWIW:

While I do think the variance ratio in math is significantly different from unity (without speculating as to the cause), it's worth pointing out that while this does explain a lot of the gender imbalance in math, it doesn't come close in computing. Off the top of my head, in math it's something like 35% women, a 1:2 ratio, whereas in tech it's closer to 10%, or 1:9.

To explain a gap that wide based on variance, we'd have to assume that men are way more than 10% more variable in computer ability than women, probably more on the order of 100%, and that seems very unlikely to me (there's not really any data to look at there because CS performance is not as commonly measured as math is).

Re: Martin Fowler: The Fallacies and Reprocussions of Diversity Imbalance

#139

Post by dgabriel »

bermanoid wrote: post #131
dgabriel wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your rewrite is completely valid. Were you expecting it to be absurd? It's not. The same interesting questions arise. I'm sure you can come up with reasons why men may choose not to make their living caring for children, even though they'd prefer to do so. Is this not a problem we should attempt to fix?

Your rewrite is completely valid. Were you expecting it to be absurd? It's not. The same interesting questions arise. I think the point is, that when "women in tech" comes up, the default assumption that people (particularly feminists) tend to jump to is that sexism is keeping women out of tech. More specifically, that sexist guys in tech are keeping women out. Even when not stated explicitly, this accusation has bee…

I'm about to get on a plane and don't have time to fully rebut, but I assure you the treatment of men in nursing school is a problem taken very seriously. Google "recruiting men in nursing," to see more.
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