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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

#151

Post by TuringTest »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #150
TuringTest wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some definition of "choose", a significant part of the choice is imposed from external forces, not freely decided. You're saying that you're OK with people not offering the more lucrative jobs to some people just because they're women, paying less for comparable works that are traditionally done by women, and men expecting that their wives - mothers - female relatives will adopt caretaking roles in addition to th…

These aren't the 1950's anymore. The career choices of women _are_ freely decided nowadays. They have the ability to go to college, get a STEM degree, and become computer scientists if they want. Equal opportunity will not mean equal outcome when there are broad physical and psychological differences between the genders.

You're missing the part where those free decisions are made with less options from which to choose, because the people that would otherwise collaborate with women are restricting their options because of irrational factors like their gender alone (without physical and psychological differences having anything to do). You're missed to take prejudice into account.

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

#152

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

telesilla wrote: post #81
K0nserv wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boys desire for large pay checks could be explained by patriarchal/societal expectations that they must be the main bread winner in a household

Right! I'm really supportive of working towards social change where a person's role in life is no longer defined by their gender.

Encouraging boys to make non-traditional career choices without making sure female marriage patterns change as well does not sound responsible to me.

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

#153

Post by JoeAltmaier »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #152
telesilla wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right! I'm really supportive of working towards social change where a person's role in life is no longer defined by their gender.

Encouraging boys to make non-traditional career choices without making sure female marriage patterns change as well does not sound responsible to me.

I humbly suggest its none of our damn business how the women choose marriage patterns (if they choose to marry at all). Its definitely not "our responsibility".

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

#154

Post by electrograv »

telesilla wrote: post #54

Let's turn the argument on it's head. Statistics say boys are more heavily inclined to have a STEM career. Does this mean they feel they cannot consider a career in other fields like teaching, nursing or other female-dominated fields? As a woman I often wonder, what's so great about STEM aside from the paycheck? It depends on your bosses (or being your own if you are lucky and that way inclined), but I don't think we…

Obviously I cannot speak for others, but for me tech and coding was and still is inspired almost entirely by the “mathematical beauty” and “creative” aspects of the tech itself; it has little to nothing to do with pay, social reasons, or anything else.

It really does involve a lot of “staring at a screen” (or paper/whiteboard brainstorming) though, and just talking about it excites me, still — it’s the intellectual/mathematical beauty and creative potential of what is being sketched on those “authoring mediums” that is so very stimulating.

When I first started coding, I was 8 years old, and I didn’t even know the first thing about whether this field would pay well, whether it would be socially engaging, etc. In fact to some extent I was actively doscourage from it, rather than joining the family gardening business (manual labor care of plants — just not for me).

None of the circumstantial reasons for or against programming mattered to me. It was the coding, the very process of staring at a screen with complex patterns and ideas as they’re authored, that excited me. It still does; creating beautiful code that does intricately complex things, that all work correctly every single time to produce the designed results, feels almost like being a modern day wizard creating magic.

Because the work itself is intrinsically motivating, it never gets old, and no amount of social pressures could sway me away from doing this.

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

#155

Post by mpweiher »

TuringTest wrote: post #125
RyanZAG wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most studies on this seem to show that gender based preferences can be at least partially explained from birth before any environmental factors play a part in it. People have been doing these studies for a long time now, but they get ignored because we don't like the results. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/ And of course, far more studies that have been going on for decades.

Biological preferences don't explain why careers preferred by women have less average pay than careers preferred by men.

No. But preferences do explain why women don't emphasize money in their career choice, whereas men do.

The vast majority of women will not continue dating a man who earns less than they do. Two thirds of young women in Germany expect their future partners to take care of them financially.

So for men, earning money and status is absolutely essential.

See also: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/02/a-lette...

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

#156

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #153
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Encouraging boys to make non-traditional career choices without making sure female marriage patterns change as well does not sound responsible to me.

I humbly suggest its none of our damn business how the women choose marriage patterns (if they choose to marry at all). Its definitely not "our responsibility".

I believe you read that the wrong way around. I'm not suggesting women change their marriage patterns.

I'm saying it is irresponsible to advice boys to make live choices that are at odds with female mating behaviour, because it adversely affects their life outcomes.

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

#157

Post by TuringTest »

mpweiher wrote: post #155
TuringTest wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biological preferences don't explain why careers preferred by women have less average pay than careers preferred by men.

No. But preferences do explain why women don't emphasize money in their career choice, whereas men do. The vast majority of women will not continue dating a man who earns less than they do. Two thirds of young women in Germany expect their future partners to take care of them financially. So for men, earning money and status is absolutely essential. See also: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/02/a-let…

What makes you think this is explained by biological preferences alone, or that those preferences scale to society-wide differences in salary?

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

#158

Post by TuringTest »

TuringTest wrote: post #120
mpweiher wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can people downvoting explain what part of my post you disagree with? I'd like to have a rational debate and maybe learn if there's something wrong in my assumptions, rather than discussion being suppressed by knee-jerk reactions.

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

#159

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

TuringTest wrote: post #151
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These aren't the 1950's anymore. The career choices of women _are_ freely decided nowadays. They have the ability to go to college, get a STEM degree, and become computer scientists if they want. Equal opportunity will not mean equal outcome when there are broad physical and psychological differences between the genders.

You're missing the part where those free decisions are made with less options from which to choose, because the people that would otherwise collaborate with women are restricting their options because of irrational factors like their gender alone (without physical and psychological differences having anything to do). You're missed to take prejudice into account.

I'm confused. Are you saying that women are kept from going into STEM careers? Because they have every incentive to do so currently, yet still choose other career paths.

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

#160

Post by gaius »

nukeop wrote: post #129
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #17

This, and similar research I'd seen before seems to point to women being equal or better at STEM than men (and also being better at non-STEM stuff), but actively avoiding it as a low-status role when they have better options. Slightly baffling to see this celebrated by men in these careers as some kind of vindication. The data appears to be saying you (we) suck, but that's a win if you think the data was going to sho…

Being a highly paid professional in an extremely intellectual field is a "low-status role"? Where? I'm fine with it if that's what you're telling yourself to cope with why you in particular were unable to enter the field, though.

Being a highly paid professional in an extremely intellectual field is a "low-status role"? Where?

Let’s not pretend that cranking out CRUD apps is in any way intellectual, outside of Silly Valley the pay is nothing special and “geek” is synonymous with “total loser”.

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