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People who are female, smart, unhindered by their society and sufficiency wealthy to have agency can choose what they want to do. Why choose software development when medicine, finance and science are open? Yeah, some are introverted and are into programming but even for those, there’s way easier money owning the developers than being one. Far too many “fail” the last two criteria.
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Why don’t European girls like science or technology? (2017)
41–50 of 57 posts
Re: Why don’t European girls like science or technology? (2017)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a thorny discussion, but it appears that IQ is unevenly distributed and the differences in variance are even stronger. And the end result seems to be that if you select for IQ > 150 people, then you expect to see 80% men 20% women purely due to biological causes. Whether or not we (the society) should accept that outcome is a completely different thing. But if you average over enough people, there are very re…
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Re: Why don’t European girls like science or technology? (2017)
#43Re: Why don’t European girls like science or technology? (2017)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Your argument should be solid enough not to need cheap shots like that.
Re: Why don’t European girls like science or technology? (2017)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pedantic much?
I don't think so, it's used a lot in the incel, and other, community in a degrading way. You don't say "I'll go to the swimming pool with my progeny" either Words have meaning, if you use "men" in a sentence why use "female" in the next ?
Re: Why don’t European girls like science or technology? (2017)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I believe some groups are offended and will call you a TERF if you use "women" because that refers more to the biology and less to the self-identified gender.
Re: Why don’t European girls like science or technology? (2017)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would have expected it to be because roughly 80% start making babies after graduation.
Not Singaporeans no. I'm pretty sure their birth rate is below replacement.
Re: Why don’t European girls like science or technology? (2017)
#48Singapore is 48.25% women in STEM vs 28% globally. https://www.ntu.edu.sg/docs/default-source/default-document-... However that number drops after graduation until it reaches a low 13.1 percent in management. The fact of the matter is that it isn't the lack of jobs or role models etc that's causing the issue, its the fact that females are worse at handling acute stress which is associated with STEM related jobs. Wome…
I don't believe that jobs like programming involve more "acute stress" than medicine or law, which many women have moved into. Not to mention nursing, as Swenrekcah pointed out. Or teaching for that matter.
Re: Why don’t European girls like science or technology? (2017)
#49Singapore is 48.25% women in STEM vs 28% globally. https://www.ntu.edu.sg/docs/default-source/default-document-... However that number drops after graduation until it reaches a low 13.1 percent in management. The fact of the matter is that it isn't the lack of jobs or role models etc that's causing the issue, its the fact that females are worse at handling acute stress which is associated with STEM related jobs. Wome…
> females are worse at handling acute stress Every time this kind of issue comes up on HN there's someone who comes along to mansplain why women are inherently less able to do tech jobs. It's not a good look for our profession and we really should be above this by now.
So while you're right that someone regularly "comes along to say $X", that's a function of population size and distribution. You can't generalize from that to the community as a whole, any more than to the human race as a whole. In the latter sense, sure, maybe "we" should really be above $badness by now, but saying that doesn't contribute to the hard work of persuasion, and neither does condemnation or name-calling or fulmination—however justified those reactions feel, they just contribute to cementing things as they are.
Edit: just for clarity:
I understand and sympathize with the frustration when you (I don't mean you personally) feel like a site is 'your' community on the internet and then you run into posts that aren't just wrong but are squarely outside the bounds of what decent people believe or say. It creates a feeling of a hostile environment that is even worse than if you had gone in expecting hostility. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
The problem though is that those bounds are drawn very differently in different subgroups of society (and the world at large) and the population here is large and distributed enough to include all those subgroups. That means it's constantly and unavoidably pregnant with conflict. For most of us, any social conflicts we're implicitly part of are insulated and regulated by the subgroup(s) we belong to. In our world, for practical emotional purposes, approximately 'everyone' agrees. There may be an occasional holiday family dinner where the larger divisions break out, but (at least for a lot of us) that's about it. The population as a whole, however, can't regulate itself that way. A population as large as HN is in the 'hostile family dinner' situation all the time, only orders of magnitude more complex and worse, and spread all over the world.
I don't think the solution can be to exclude subgroups. It has to be to communicate across differences. One could call it 'supported communication across differences', where by 'supported' I mean having a scaffolding of principles that everyone is expected to follow (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, in HN's case.)
In practice, yes, that does mean going backward and having arguments that "we" should be beyond by now. But that's because there are many different versions of "we" here. If you take all the basis vectors of HN and consider the full opinion space they expand into, I'm not sure it's that much less complex or diverse than the entire world.