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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

#41

Post by rimliu »

lliamander wrote: post #35
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…

> Slightly baffling to see this celebrated by men in these careers as some kind of vindication. An amusing and insightful observation. I would say it's baffling until you realize that the alternative is that the whole the gap in female STEM employment continues to be attributed solely to male sexism. It's better to be perceived as stupid than evil. Also, are we all now in agreement that there are likely cognitive dif…

  > are we all now in agreement that there are likely
  > cognitive differences between men and women
Alas, far from it I am afraid. Which is very puzzling. Not many will argue that men and women have different physiology, different physical build. But god forbid from making the assumption that cognitive interests may also differ.

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

#43

Post by RyanZAG »

platz wrote: post #25
dvt wrote: post #2

Equality of opportunity does not necessarily imply equality of outcome . This isn't a paradox. Why are still people still confused about this? (Actually, people aren't confused about this, but it makes for great clickbait articles and ad revenue because it fans the flames of both sides of the argument.)

Preferences aren't static, and are part of a dynamical system. It needs to be explained why preferences are the way they are. Environment could be changed to address causes of preference

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.

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

#44

Post by skjerns »

gonvaled wrote: post #10

I would take the whole equality movement more seriously if I had been able, in the past decade, to spot a negative news article / report on women. When you get all the time exclusively negative news about men, you could start thinking that this is a coordinated (or emergent?) campaign.

coordinated by who? By negative reports you mean 'something that women do wrong'?

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

#45

Post by halflings »

zerr wrote: post #14

One reason could be - in poor/developing countries STEM is understood as the escape path from the poverty, while in developed countries people seem assured in their future even if they go in humanities or any other non-tech field - thus following their interests/hobbies rather than the need. EDIT: unintentional tl;dr as it seems :)

Anecdotal +1 to this thesis, which is also presented in the article:

I come from Morocco (quite similar to Algeria/Tunisia, which seem to have the highest % of women in STEM), and people are first looking for a job that will guarantee financial freedom. STEM jobs seem to be the most likely to guarantee this, and as such there's more women interested in these fields.

Looking at the graph however, this doesn't seem to explain the full variance (many developing countries have lower levels of representation).

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

#46

Post by lopmotr »

ekianjo wrote: post #13
afroboy wrote: post #9

I just discovered that where i work (Algeria) there is hidden rule in hiring new devs that wasn't known publicly it's simply no women, seriously i work with 20 men for more than two years and i just discovered that our head of recruitment doesn't hire woman at all no matter how she's talented because of so many reason most of them are racist but kind are hard to argue with him like if woman get married she will stop…

In a free market such companies would be at disadvantage versus the ones who also attract top talent regardless of gender or race or any other demographic criteria whatsoever.

Only if they could easily assess ability. It sounds like gender is a fairly reliable indicator of performance in Algeria, so it probably helps to just use it. They might miss some occasional great women but will save themselves from the majority of low performing ones. I'm not saying it's right to discriminate like this, just that it could be competitive to do so.

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

#47

Post by gaius »

afroboy wrote: post #9

I just discovered that where i work (Algeria) there is hidden rule in hiring new devs that wasn't known publicly it's simply no women, seriously i work with 20 men for more than two years and i just discovered that our head of recruitment doesn't hire woman at all no matter how she's talented because of so many reason most of them are racist but kind are hard to argue with him like if woman get married she will stop…

no matter how she's talented because of so many reason most of them are racist

I don’t think that means what you think it means

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

#49

Post by RyanZAG »

ekianjo wrote: post #13
afroboy wrote: post #9

I just discovered that where i work (Algeria) there is hidden rule in hiring new devs that wasn't known publicly it's simply no women, seriously i work with 20 men for more than two years and i just discovered that our head of recruitment doesn't hire woman at all no matter how she's talented because of so many reason most of them are racist but kind are hard to argue with him like if woman get married she will stop…

In a free market such companies would be at disadvantage versus the ones who also attract top talent regardless of gender or race or any other demographic criteria whatsoever.

That's assuming an internal company culture couldn't be created based on shared understanding that would lead to competitive advantage. Eg, if you create a company with only black women, you may not necessarily get the very best individuals, but you could create a very unique culture. That culture could empower the whole team to work better with each other with the end result being a more productive team even though individuals may be less productive alone. It could also reduce turnover and increase job satisfaction, leading to less time spent training and cheaper and more productive overtime for the company.

Such a company could be at an advantage in a free market where there were no rules on employment discrimination.

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

#50

Post by lsy »

Drawing conclusions about "innate" differences between men and women from this data doesn't seem valid. There's a lot of research left to eliminate confounding effects on participation that aren't covered or investigated by the "Global Gender Gap Index" (e.g. cultural attitudes towards women in STEM, or on-the-job discrimination). Scatter-plotting two datasets available on the internet doesn't feel like enough research for me to dismiss reports from women that they are discouraged from CS before, and during, their careers.

The trendline cited in the article isn't even conclusive, either—eliminating outliers would reduce it almost to noise. Even if it were, there hasn't, to date, been any reasonable explanation for why women's "innate" biology would make them any less interested in professions whose parameters and limitations are purely human-constructed and invented in the past century. Whatever happened during the evolution of the sexes was certainly not informed by the interestingness of C++.

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