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The power of role models

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Re: The power of role models

#321

Post by maccard »

tptacek wrote: post #233
maccard wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one indication, look at the ratio of women to men graduating from STEM courses in universities. Even in school, the number of women taking STEM subjects is dwarfed by the number of men. While the issues another poster has mentioned (uber etc) I'm sure do not help the situation, it's still a huge problem even at school ages.

No, this claim is false for any reasonable definition of "STEM" and "dwarfed".

Seems it's a little more nuanced than this actually, sorry. The only numbers I could find were at [0] (I'm in the UK).

At GCSE level (roughly aged 15/16) there's an equal split across STEM subjects. For A levels, there's more men than women in every STEM subject bar biology, and women achieve higher grades on average.

At university level, men dominate in most of the subjects (engineering is 86% male and CS is 83% male). The problem stems far deeper than the workplace, and is definitely present in Educatikn.

[0] https://www.wisecampaign.org.uk/uploads/wise/files/WISE_UK_S...

Re: The power of role models

#322

Post by dominotw »

watwut wrote: post #316
zigzigzag wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seem to be far more female programmers in India and former Soviet bloc countries. Poverty is the obvious link. When you want a well paid job, niceties like role models or what your friends think are less important, and gender ratios become more balanced.

I am from former Soviet block country and there is no surge of female programmers. Also, poor people don't become programmers - only middle class kids do. Poor don't have computers at home and schools don't teach programming. You have to learn from elsewhere.

Curious what you mean by middle class? in the 90's there was no such thing as middle class in India, everyone was poor. From what I read soviet countries like Russia were the same in 90's, sure some people were slightly better off than other but not enough to form a social class. Perhaps things are different now ?

Re: The power of role models

#323

Post by 4ad »

adrianmacneil wrote: post #53
4ad wrote: post #7

> The best way to improve the representation of women in the field is [...] to promote them. [...] To push them into positions of influence. I am all for equality in chances for all people, men and women, black and white, gay and straight, anything really, but this affirmative action "promote X because she is a women" (or black, or XXX) is something I will fight against with all my being and all my forces until the d…

Have you considered that purely meritocratic actions, with no affirmative action, might only result in reaching a local maxima of productivity for an organization or industry? It's possible that by following your stance and having pure equality, we will not reach an ideal state that could have been reached, given some short term hires/promotions to create role models which then help others to reach their potential.

There is no doubt that this is true, but I do not consider optimising metrics such as productivity across industries or even across humanity itself to be a worthwhile goal. In fact, I consider it to be a dangerous goal in itself.

I have little doubt that an AI-driven society with sociopolitical decisions taken by some benevolent artificial dictator, with a planned economy, would score very high in whatever metrics we consider important, but that is not a world I want to live in. Not even if we could find a way to objectively measure happiness and the society would be based on maximising aggregate happiness.

I want a live in a world that empowers the individual, and leaves the individual with the choice on how to live his life. A world where each individual has and feels the liberty to pursue happiness.

I have little doubt that this world is most certainly not optimal based on most aggregate metrics you can think of, such as productivity across industries.

Re: The power of role models

#324

Post by tptacek »

maccard wrote: post #321
tptacek wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this claim is false for any reasonable definition of "STEM" and "dwarfed".

Seems it's a little more nuanced than this actually, sorry. The only numbers I could find were at [0] (I'm in the UK). At GCSE level (roughly aged 15/16) there's an equal split across STEM subjects. For A levels, there's more men than women in every STEM subject bar biology, and women achieve higher grades on average. At university level, men dominate in most of the subjects (engineering is 86% male and CS is 83% mal…

Only if by "most of the subjects" you mean "engineering and CS", which, along with physics, are the entire male bastion of science. Every other scientific field does far better, including pure math, chemistry, neuroscience, astronomy (as Pike notes in this piece), and molecular biology, where women make up (wait for it) over 50% of PhDs granted every year.

Re: The power of role models

#325

Post by tptacek »

gaius wrote: post #296
DanBC wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were told three years ago about the programmes that exist to correct the gender balance in each of those industries. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6508777#6509275 Women in mining: http://internationalwim.org/ http://www.womeninmining.org/ Women in construction: http://www.nawic.org/nawic/default.asp (some editing to tone it down a bit.)

You were told three years ago And yet, the problem still exists, no? So my statement was merely one of fact. some editing to tone it down a bit Don't worry you got your changes in before I could take a screenshot to post on another site without context to stir up the outrage #hnwatch

It's a bad idea to attack someone for taking extra effort to strip inflammatory stuff out of their comments. That's exactly what we want commenters to do.

Re: The power of role models

#326

Post by justin66 »

zigzigzag wrote: post #313
justin66 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring to correct a disparity in the proportion of men vs women on a team, to make it somewhat less ridiculously uneven in its tilt toward men, would be quite easy to defend in court. I'd be interested in knowing if any court cases of "zomg reverse discrimination" have ever been won by white dudes under those circumstances.

Either the courts would apply the law and Pike/Google would receive the punishment, or they wouldn't and the clear written intent of the law would have been subverted. If Congress wanted to systematically disadvantage men in favour of women they should have called it the "Female Rights Act". With respect to your question the answer is yes, such cases have been won, like this one: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2…

I'm looking at the article, and the material: 1) Doesn't involve the Civil Rights Act 2) Doesn't involve hiring at all 3) Involves settlements rather than court wins

I strongly suspect that you don't like quotas, or intentional correction of a massive gender disparity in hiring, and so on, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong about the limits of the Civil Rights Act with regards to hiring.

Hiring more women after realizing "we have a huge gender disparity problem" seems to me (not a lawyer) the sort of thing a company's employment lawyers would be happy to defend in court. If there are any real counterexamples, yeah, that'd be interesting to read about.

Re: The power of role models

#327

Post by digi_owl »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #77
skywhopper wrote: post #12

Programming used to be a field with significant numbers of women, including true pioneers like Grace Hopper. IIRC, female computer science majors peaked in the 80s, and have been declining since. Even with those low numbers these days, a lot of women who are interested in programming and computer science are chased away early on, or they quickly move into more welcoming fields. So it's true that among senior staff, w…

I raised two girls who found the "alpha geek" phenomenon totally repugnant. One is heading back into a CS degree in her thirties; the other went bio and is an entrepreneur. I have to wonder if the chasing away is not to their benefit. Perhaps the ugly is not just a ... social artifact but more of a reflection of the nature of the course of study. Two things spring to mind: - the curious economics of program-correctne…

Equilibrium was a massive thing in all sciences until the 60s and Lorenz's plotting of a "simple" 3 variable hot plate model.

Economics is one of the last sciences that sadly cling to that notion.

BTW, are geek and nerd synonyms now?

Re: The power of role models

#328

Post by jkaptur »

Shubley wrote: post #288
stale2002 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can figure out the reason that they left by asking them. This isn't something that is controversial. There is lots of research into this. https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/the-real-reason-wome... http://news.mit.edu/2016/why-do-women-leave-engineering-0615 http://alltogether.swe.org/2016/04/real-reason-women-leave-s... Are just a couple, actually published research attempts that I found with a 2 minute goog…

People don't give (or often even know) the real reasons they do things. Steeped in a culture of sexism accusations, it's not surprising that you'd hear reports of sexism from women leaving the industry. A man doing the exact same thing (and many men do leave tech) would say their boss was an asshole, or they hated the hours, or whatever. Women are prodded and trained to interpret exactly the same circumstances as sex…

What would it take to convince you that the tech industry is more hostile to women than men? Honest question.

Re: The power of role models

#329

Post by pvg »

nielsabel wrote: post #307
dang wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This aggressive rant crosses the line on HN. If you can't contain your anger enough to post substantively and with respect for opposing views, you're not welcome to post here. It's not in your interest to do this anyhow, since it undercuts everything you're saying.

> This aggressive rant crosses the line on HN. If you can't contain your anger I'm not angry at all, really. Merely stating my perspective. > enough to post substantively and with respect for opposing views, you're not welcome to post here. It seems to me that my view is the opposing one. Balancing the different views, in my opinion, is the job of the (critical) reader. How is the reader supposed to do this if all op…

>you should judge what I say, not how I say it.

That seems obviously inaccurate in any moderated forum. Or we'd all be published New Yorker writers.

Re: The power of role models

#330

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #325
gaius wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were told three years ago And yet, the problem still exists, no? So my statement was merely one of fact. some editing to tone it down a bit Don't worry you got your changes in before I could take a screenshot to post on another site without context to stir up the outrage #hnwatch

It's a bad idea to attack someone for taking extra effort to strip inflammatory stuff out of their comments. That's exactly what we want commenters to do.

[deleted]
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