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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

#181

Post by aspaceman »

throwaway613834 wrote: post #102
aspaceman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If you feel differently, and you are a woman then I highly encourage you to become more involved with activism because that is the only way to make your voice and opinions heard. It is not fair that all womens' positions have been decided by activists, and many women in tech have specifically noted this issue. However, activism is available for any individual interested in it.

> Yes. If you feel differently, and you are a woman then I highly encourage you to become more involved with activism because that is the only way to make your voice and opinions heard. And what kind of social or career impact on their lives do you expect from such activism against the current flow?

In the United States, political views are a protected class and one can sue if fired on the basis of them.

I expect one will claim that James Damore offers evidence of a life being "ruined" by their views, but I think the kid is doing pretty damn well for himself - especially due to his views. If you are a conservative activist in tech then feel free to shout your views from the rooftops, I'm sure there are many on 4chan who would love to follow you and help you succeed.

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

#182

Post by OtterCoder »

jacobsheehy wrote: post #127
OtterCoder wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You miss the point that a satisfied person has little incentive for activism. Also, most conservative opinions tend to be met with anything from disgust to derision online, further disincentivizing counter-protest.

> You miss the point that a satisfied person has little incentive for activism. This is interesting - what do you mean by this? I'm not sure what you mean in this context, but in an overall, general sense I strongly disagree. Certainly there is significant incentive for activism from a satisfied person. A person may be satisfied but that does not mean that there is not room for improvement or change. Satisfaction is…

I am frankly blown away that you feel persecuted for liberal opinions online. We must both go to the wrong fora for our ideologies.

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

#183

Post by neaanopri »

joelthelion wrote: post #70
aspaceman wrote: post #56

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. OP did not draw that conclusion.

OP's scenario:

1. There are a minority of women in tech. 2. Trying to correct (1) will do more harm than good.

aspaceman's scenario:

1. There are a minority of women in tech, because on the whole, more men like tech jobs than women. NOT that NO women would do tech jobs, but in the "absence of discrimination", maybe gender ratios would be 60-40 men or something. 2. Because women are in the minority, male co-workers take them less seriously, and their opinions aren't as valued as mens'. 3. Womens' opinions being less valued, etc., results in women leaving tech for other fields. 4. Tech gender ratios are further skewed than they otherwise would be (Maybe 80-20 men).

Now here's where it gets tricky. It _is_ entirely possible that trying to correct these imbalances would do more harm than good. However, it is _also_ possible that there are some "low-hanging fruit" corrections which would bring tech gender ratios back into balance without really inconveniencing anybody. Given that it's possible that some interventions might bring about a more natural gender ratio, it's reasonable to try many different types of interventions, and see which ones work.

Note that the root of this problem is men not taking women seriously. The more serious men take womens' views, the better everything gets.

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

#184

Post by hyperdunc »

tptacek wrote: post #141

This is on the front page of Hacker News because people here believe it bolsters arguments about the underlying fairness of our field, in which women make up something like 20% of the workforce. The article does not accomplish that. Despite an overall trend in STEM throughout the western world for greater male participation than female, computer science is uniquely low ; it is rivaled only by physics and MechE for ge…

> Whatever is keeping women to 20% of our field is artificial, and a travesty.

In what sense is it artificial? And why is it a travesty? Is it also a travesty that much less than 20% of all nurses are male?

Gender parity seems to have become dogma. I'm not saying increasing parity has no value, just that its value is not so evident.

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

#185

Post by lulmerchant »

geofft wrote: post #149
lulmerchant wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it does. Feminism is ingrained into the cultures of these countries. The data overwhelmingly shows that when you give men and women equal opportunities and the freedom to make their own choices, that men and women, on average, make different choices. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. Apart from those who buy into the world view that the only two groups in any society are the oppressed and their…

> Feminism is ingrained into the cultures of these countries. Given that the leader of the free world has said that he's not a feminist, I'm not sure I would say that it's ingrained into the culture. It's a recent cultural phenomenon of these countries, sure. But Western civilization has a much deeper culture of patrilineal succession, of the priesthood being restricted to men, of only men having political representa…

I'll ignore the irrelevant marxist talking point and trump references, and redirect you back to the data. The Nordic countries always lead in these stats.

These are the countries that are the most egalitarian in the world, where 3rd wave feminism forms a major part of social policy, where women have an equal level of opportunity to men and the freedom to choose their own paths in life. The data shows that under these conditions, this freedom has a negative correlation to women choosing a career in STEM.

You can't say that this is a remnant of some patriarchal system of oppression, because as women's freedom has increased in those countries, their participation in STEM has decreased.

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

#186

Post by NewEntryHN »

nicolashahn wrote: post #9

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 agree about not forcing the distribution. I think positive action either solves no issue (no sexism in the industry and the current distribution is simply the "natural" one); or doesn't solve the deeper issue (sexism in the industry). However, until there's no scientific consensus about whether or not there's sexism in the workplace, the current state is not satisfying and we should continue until we clear out that concern, and if there is sexism, fix it.

My personal guess would be that there's indeed sexism, particularly in the programming industry. This overall "not my problem" attitude from men about anything regarding this subject is a clear hint of it.

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

#187

Post by ec109685 »

greentuna wrote: post #150

One thing I have noticed is that male engineers are intrinsically motivated but female engineers, even highly capable ones, are extrinsically motivated. So you find very few female engineers in open source projects, under 3% by some estimates, although the percentage of female professional software engineers is much higher. Clearly this is not due to discrimination —- github doesn’t ask you your gender. So there must…

GitHub doesn’t ask for gender, yet you assume the 3% figure is accurate.

Even if you do, it doesn’t make sense to correlate GitHub contributions with “intrinsic” motivation. You can still love to code but not want to contribute to Open Source.

Also, what percentage of software engineers regularly contribute to a non-corporate sponsored GitHub open source project? I would bet it is a small number, which means you shouldn’t use it as a proxy to generalize for the industry and gender differences within it.

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

#188

Post by mpweiher »

eecc wrote: post #142
mpweiher wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so incredibly condescending. People need "counseling" because they don't choose what you think they should choose? How about just respecting people's choices ??

You’re turning it around, this is not about disrespecting personal choice, but rather to identify conditioning factors that effectively force out women that would have otherwise taken that path.

Nope, you are turning it around.

The data from the article shows that women aren't "forced out", but rather that when external forces are removed they prefer to do other things.

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

#189

Post by walterstucco »

majos wrote: post #35
js8 wrote: post #12

"If governments want to increase women’s participation in STEM, a more effective strategy might be to target the girls who are clearly being lost from the STEM pathway – those for whom science and maths are their best subjects and who enjoy it but still don’t choose it" I don't understand why we should try to make somebody choose a subject they didn't choose to do.

I think the logic here is a nontrivial portion of the women who "fall out of the pipeline" do it for reasons other than lack of enthusiasm for the subject. If indeed there are girls who want to pursue math/cs but run into extrinsic obstacles that put them off, we should try to identify what those obstacles are.

They are called life

There is no such thing as a career without having to overcome obstacles

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

#190

Post by naasking »

tptacek wrote: post #141

This is on the front page of Hacker News because people here believe it bolsters arguments about the underlying fairness of our field, in which women make up something like 20% of the workforce. The article does not accomplish that. Despite an overall trend in STEM throughout the western world for greater male participation than female, computer science is uniquely low ; it is rivaled only by physics and MechE for ge…

> This is on the front page of Hacker News because people here believe it bolsters arguments about the underlying fairness of our field, in which women make up something like 20% of the workforce.

You're being uncharitable again. What it does establish is that the most common narrative for gender disparity in our field doesn't cleanly explain all of the data, unless you simultaneously push for the belief that programmers are more sexist than every other previously male dominated field that has since achieved better gender ratios, and that this bias exists across different cultures thus yielding the same disparities in all of these different cultures, and that this systemic sexism is what's driving women away (despite not keeping women away from other fields in which they achieved parity).

Of course, there's another explanation, which is that women have inherently less interest in some subjects for some reason, and there's considerable evidence for this possibility. To ignore it is dishonest.

Which isn't to say that there isn't sexism, but you're making a positive claim that the sexism is so much worse than everywhere else.

As for why some STEM fields have improved, there can be plenty of reasons, and those are all worth studying. To simply declare it's because they've made inroads against sexism is assuming the conclusion.

> Whatever is keeping women to 20% of our field is artificial, and a travesty.

You keep saying this, but you cite no evidence of artificiality. There's actually plenty of evidence that it's not.

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