Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nearly Half of US Female Scientists Leave Full-Time Science After First Child

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–165 of 165 posts

Re: Nearly Half of US Female Scientists Leave Full-Time Science After First Child

#161

Post by tomp »

roenxi wrote: post #91
thomasmeeks wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is a quick Google search away, diversity increases innovation: https://www.google.com/search?q=diversity+increases+innovati... If you don't agree with that, I'd love to hear why, and why the related studies are false. Can start with this one, which is the first result: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685... There's quite the bibliography to pour through there, though, if you really…

The study you linked has nothing to do with gender or diversity w.r.t. minorities. It's subject is economic geography. We can be pretty confident that if 50% of the population are women then 50% of the best candidates for a given job, by natural aptitude, are women. The same logic applies to minorities as well, so we can be confident that any process calibrated to finding the best person for the job is going to turn…

> We can be pretty confident that if 50% of the population are women then 50% of the best candidates for a given job, by natural aptitude, are women

You shouldn't be as confident as you're probably wrong. Women have on average better verbal intelligence, and men have on average better spacial intelligence. So we can be confident there are jobs where either men or women are more likely to be best candidates.

Re: Nearly Half of US Female Scientists Leave Full-Time Science After First Child

#162

Post by towaway1138 »

chriskanan wrote: post #2

While the title focuses on female scientists, males are also affected. From the article: "...23% of men and 43% of women who had become parents had left full-time STEM employment. ... This compared to 16% of child-free men and 24% of child-free women."

Indeed, if you stare at the bar chart for a moment, you'll realize that a sufficient explanation is that women more often have the option to reduce their hours or stop working entirely. In our culture, men generally don't have the privilege of doing so.

I've lived this myself and also watched many instances of it in friends and colleagues. Is anyone really shocked by the idea that new mothers might decide they'd like to stay home and raise their kids?

As a man, I'd almost have killed to stay home and have my wife keep working, but that's just not how it is.

Re: Nearly Half of US Female Scientists Leave Full-Time Science After First Child

#163

Post by zeroname »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #131
zeroname wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, let's forget the word "perfectly". Let's have a "practical" example. A society is made up of 99% "ethnic Germans" and 1% Jews. The year is 1933. A faculty is made up of 90% "ethnic Germans" and 10% Jews. According to the hypothesis, getting that makeup closer to the societal demographics will result in a "lower risk of bias". I hope it is now obvious to see that the hypothesis is a non-sequitur.

How is that a counter-example? They diverged from the overall population to an extreme level (one demographic over-represented by a 10x factor compared to the overall population) and also had an extreme level of bias (imprisoned and murdered a specific demographic).

The specific values are irrelevant, for the hypothesis to be true, it has to be true for all cases.

Let's take another example:

A planet somewhere in the milky way galaxy is populated equally by Red, Blue and Green Octopodes. They are biased differently in three dimensions:

  Red   (3,     2,    -2)
  Blue  (0,     3,     4)
  Green (23,  -56,   128)
The goal is to minimize bias. The hypothesis says bias in a group will be minimized by giving each color group an equal share in the group. However, at a first glance, we can immediately see that in order to minimize bias, we must reduce the number of Green Octopodes in the group. The hypothesis is wrong, because it doesn't generalize.

Note, I'm not making an argument against diversity. The average Green Octopode may hold extremist views, but they shouldn't be excluded from a group merely to reduce bias. Just like humans, Green Octopodes should be treated as the individuals that they are, not as a weight in a multivariate optimization problem.

Re: Nearly Half of US Female Scientists Leave Full-Time Science After First Child

#164

Post by roenxi »

tomp wrote: post #161
roenxi wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The study you linked has nothing to do with gender or diversity w.r.t. minorities. It's subject is economic geography. We can be pretty confident that if 50% of the population are women then 50% of the best candidates for a given job, by natural aptitude, are women. The same logic applies to minorities as well, so we can be confident that any process calibrated to finding the best person for the job is going to turn…

> We can be pretty confident that if 50% of the population are women then 50% of the best candidates for a given job, by natural aptitude, are women You shouldn't be as confident as you're probably wrong. Women have on average better verbal intelligence, and men have on average better spacial intelligence. So we can be confident there are jobs where either men or women are more likely to be best candidates.

No, I'm right. If you want to pick some super-specialist job that requires top 1% verbal skills then sure you want a woman doing it, but most jobs only require slightly above-average skills which will fall into a roughly 50-50 split.

And even then you can't reasonably claim that most jobs are better performed by spatial or verbal thinking. Both tend to have their moments.

Post reply on HN