31–40 of 134 posts
I stopped reading right there. Should I change from a dress to some pants? Cut my hair short? Watch football? Didn't we have this argument about doctors and lawyers 80 years ago?
this is easily backed by data which shows that the level womens rights in a country has a strong inverse correlation to the number of women in STEM fields. this way, even before we consider the merits of the sexes we have a simple explanation which avoids the classic battle of the sexes arguments... and actually i'm sure women know this themselves - after all they are the ones who regularly decide that they would prefer to enter a non STEM field.
having few women in STEM fields is ironically an indicator of having a free and liberal society with strong rights for women.
I invited three women to be on the board of my corporation. All of them turned me down. All of the men I invited onto my board accepted.
Edit: I'm asking because @dnautics gave us an anecdote that doesn't add anything useful. Knowing why would be much more interesting, although still an anecdote.
First, let's talk about mathematical ability. It's widely known that men outnumber women in the upper percentiles of mathematical ability. However, that's an explanation for why there are so few female Fields Medalists (in fact, there are none), not why there are so few female engineers.
Among people who score a perfect 800 on the Math SAT (top 1% starts at 770), men outnumber women only 2:1. Even if mathematical ability is totally determinative, and being a programmer required top 0.3-0.5% of mathematical ability, we would expect to see ratios of maybe 65/35 in the programming world, not 90/10 or 95/5. Due to the shapes of the bell curves in question, the disparity between men and women gets quite large when you get into the 0.1% or 0.01% of mathematical ability. But, by and large, Silicon Valley isn't made up of those people. They're more run of the mill smart people (Stanford's SAT Math inter-quartiles are 93rd-99th percentile).
With regards to the points about competitiveness versus cooperation and risk-taking and caring about people, they all beg the question. Why is competitiveness a good thing for the business of writing software? Don't you think cooperation would be better for such a deeply team-oriented discipline? Why isn't caring about people a positive strength, when much of Silicon Valley 2.0 is fluffy social stuff? Finally, while more risk-aversion might explain why there are fewer female founders, it doesn't seem to be the case that females are less represented in startups than in technology companies in general. What's risky about going to work at Microsoft or Google?
The refrain of "these statistics are things nobody is willing to talk about!" is a cop-out. Most people will not pillory you for pointing out that women are more risk-averse or do things differently. Indeed, it's something women themselves often talk about. My wife was recently at a social gathering for women attorneys. She recounted a discussion of how women tend to disclose when they haven't done something before, while men tend to say "sure I can do that." It's not 1990 and people are quite willing to discuss how men and women approach work differently. But the statistics only support conclusions as strong as the scope of the evidence. And in this article, the author wanders far beyond what the statistics support into blatant conjecture and rationalization.
Hardly a definitive proof that it's all just biology. I'd scale it back, and draw the conclusions more conservatively. Along the lines of 'employment statistics don't necessarily imply discrimination'. Just because twitter's board is mostly male, doesn't necessarily mean that being male was a requirement. No one would argue that truck drivers are mostly men due to hiring policies.
No, but people would argue that mostly men are truck drivers due to rigid gender roles and strict gender policing of the patriarchy.
I'd say it's simply because it's a crappy, low-paying, exhausting job with too many working hours, which not many people want. Men usually get such jobs.
And who can blame them really?
My mother built one business after another even though my grandfather was forcing her to be a math teacher. She started 4+ businesses and each one carried the name of a guy in my family (even my brother, as soon as he turned 18) because businesses weren't supposed to be led by women.
I am female. At 8 I was hit on as the only girl hanging out in a robotics lab. At 13 I was mocked for writing code. At 15 I was asked to quit school to work at a tech firm, but instead I kept working on my own freelance business in parallel. At 18 I ranked second among peers in my country. I moved to the US, kept working, and continue to grow my skills and tech startup in the valley today. There are many more like me. Wait 10 more years and see what happens to the statistics and attitudes. In the mean time, my job is to keep proving those that bet against me and other female hacker-founders wrong through the product of my work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but people would argue that mostly men are truck drivers due to rigid gender roles and strict gender policing of the patriarchy.
Do you have any statistics/reasoning that support this argument? I'd say it's simply because it's a crappy, low-paying, exhausting job with too many working hours, which not many people want. Men usually get such jobs.
What’s your alternative explanation?
This sounds like it was written for a 12th grade research assignment and makes several incorrect inferences without a basis of fact, i.e. the male hunting equating to math reasoning. I tend to think of it as the same reason minorities are not prevalent in these places either, probably because society held them as "lower class" until recently and they are just now making gains which are long overdue. All in all, women…
Except that they are. Do Chinese and Indian people cease to be minorities when discussing tech?
Hardly a definitive proof that it's all just biology. I'd scale it back, and draw the conclusions more conservatively. Along the lines of 'employment statistics don't necessarily imply discrimination'. Just because twitter's board is mostly male, doesn't necessarily mean that being male was a requirement. No one would argue that truck drivers are mostly men due to hiring policies.
No, but people would argue that mostly men are truck drivers due to rigid gender roles and strict gender policing of the patriarchy.