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Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

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Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#451

Post by commandlinefan »

meuk wrote: post #282
tptacek wrote: post #152

Once again: compared to other STEM fields, women participate less in CS than any other field except physics. By double digits percentage more in mathematics PhDs. Statistics is almost 50/50. Several rigorous earth sciences fields --- chem and biochem, for instance --- have 50% or greater female participation. One thing all these fields have in common is that they are more intellectually rigorous and harder to succeed…

Artificial? I would say cultural. I would surely like there to be more women in CS. There are literally no women at my office, and the only women I met for the last six months are from HR. I am single, and so is about 50% of my coworkers - this is not a particularly good position to be in on the 'relationship market'. On the other hand, I can't blame women for not wanting my job. IT has a reputation for attracting wh…

> There are literally no women at my office

Really? Where do you work (as in what part of the country)? I'm in the Dallas area and have been for 20 years - everywhere I've ever worked has had lots of women (close to 50/50) in technical roles. They're almost all Indian, though (as are 90% of the people in any technical roles). Rare to see a female manager of any nationality, though.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#452

Post by dominotw »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #446
dominotw wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visas are overwhelmingly only granted to technical fields. So people who can immigrate to america are the ones in technical fields. You won't see lots of indian students studying philosophy because once you are done you have to go back. Bad monetary investment. Want a better life = study engineering. The explanation is as simple as that.

>> Visas are overwhelmingly only granted to technical fields. So people who can immigrate to america are the ones in technical fields. Even so, why are there more of those technical immigrants female than the locals? That the majority of visas granted are for technical fields doesn't tell us anything about the gender of those who obtain them. There's nothing stopping 100% of immigrant IT workers from, e.g. India from…

> Even so, why are there more of those technical immigrants female than the locals?

You are comparing locals( general population) to immigrant females( self selected group). Ofcourse population selected for technical degrees has higher % of technical degrees.

> There's nothing stopping 100% of immigrant IT workers from, e.g. India from being male. Why are they not?

Because all people want better life male or female. Getting into tech(even if goes against their inherent choices) for Immigrant female population is worth the high reward vs local population where upside of getting into tech is might not be worth going against their inherent interests.

> the majority of agricultural workers are from the EU

You explained it yourself. What you are asking is equivalent to 'why aren't there more of UK natives among agricultural workers'.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#453

Post by weeelvil »

collyw wrote: post #300
weeelvil wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with tptacek here. Based on just my experience (contractor then corporate programmer for the last decade), probably 99% of programming work out there in the world is mechanical rote that just involves reading comprehension and the ability to mechanically execute steps in some order. Calling this type of work complex only means someone fucked up somewhere. Certainly there are specializations that are pushing t…

15 years in I have built systems from scratch and done menial janitor work. I don't think its fair to say that that it isn't complex, some shitty work can be really complex due to subtleties and it would take someone with a fair bit of experience to fix. If it was so easy there wouldn't be a shortage of tech workers and our wages would be way lower.

Im not saying this type of work cant be complex (again, usually because “someone fucked up somewhere”), but it certainly doesn’t have to be.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#454

Post by icefox »

corpMaverick wrote: post #331
jenthoven wrote: post #244

I’m a CS graduate and female founder. I disagree with many parts of this essay, but I actually agree with this part: “The sex difference in interest in people extends to a more general interest in living things, which would explain why women who are interested in science are much more likely to pursue a career in biology or veterinary medicine than computer science“ I believe that, at age 18, women have more sophisti…

> I believe that, at age 18, women have more sophisticated social lives I think you are on to something. This is really the critical age when the decision happens. Everything else is the just the result of this. My own theory, is that CS (programming) is perceived as having low social status. Women are socially smarter, so they are aware of that. Men are clueless, so they are more likely to choose programming and lat…

> My own theory, is that CS (programming) is perceived as having low social status.

A colleague told me when out at a bar he refrains from telling women that he is a programmer because they suddenly become way more interested because they know how much $$$ programming jobs bring in. That does not sound like low social status signalling to me, but the opposite at least for males.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#455

Post by icefox »

Caveman_Coder wrote: post #208
novia wrote: post #192

Hi everyone. I'm a woman with a math degree who just completed a computer programming certificate. I've wanted to study math my whole life, and I wasn't exposed to programming as a field of study until college. I just wanted to state that, for the record, having these sorts of discussions on hacker news is extremely distressing to me. I've worked hard to get the accreditations that I have, and I usually enjoy the thi…

> "When I pursue a career in this field, how will my coworkers perceive me?" In all honesty, recently I've seen underperforming women get promoted to positions they shouldn't have been promoted to because of political pressures, so there is going to be some sense of "is she competent or is she a diversity hire/promotion?" They also might think, does she really enjoy tech, is she a nerd like me, or is she just looking…

> They also might think, does she really enjoy tech, is she a nerd like me, or is she just looking for a cushy office job in software that the "diversity/women-in-X" groups are so loudly promoting.

Hell I think that about all my colleagues whatever their gender is. Seen plenty of males don't really want to code, but it pays too well to not.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#456

Post by weeelvil »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #362
weeelvil wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with tptacek here. Based on just my experience (contractor then corporate programmer for the last decade), probably 99% of programming work out there in the world is mechanical rote that just involves reading comprehension and the ability to mechanically execute steps in some order. Calling this type of work complex only means someone fucked up somewhere. Certainly there are specializations that are pushing t…

I always find it interesting that game programmers have to be so much more technically skilled (well, until the age of game engine middle-ware) than full-stack CRUD jockeys, and yet are compensated much worse. Science is fucking hard, and biology is fucking complicated. Trying to make this transition now, and ermahgerd I thought I dealt with complex system. Not!

Agree 100%, although the same could be said of UI developers back before “middleware” (browsers, decent ui frameworks, etc). That shit was hard and required geometry and matrices. Occasionally your CSS guru today will touch on that stuff (that is the 1%), but with thousands of libraries or working implementations at their disposal. I think this will happen eventually in all specializations - you will eventually have your “ML devs” that invoke a library to recognize a hotdog in an image etc.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#457

Post by Goladus »

dragonwriter wrote: post #219
traverseda wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nursing pays quite well and has a similar gender ratio, in the opposite direction. It's unlikely that's due to two completely different mechanisms, so I'd put more stock in theories that explain both situations.

Per BLS, registered nurses have a $68,450 median salary. [0] Software developers have a $102,280 median salary. [1] [0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/mobile/registered-nurses.... [1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

The difficulty here lies in actually doing a reasonable compare/contrast that looks at the entire system. You wouldn't compare the salary of a PhD principal software architect to a registered nurse at a pediatrics office. Just like you wouldn't compare the salary of a cardiac surgeon to a junior programmer.

There are many professional and specialist roles in the medical field that go beyond "nursing" but don't require going to med school for full MD training. You have occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech-language pathologists, physicians assistants, nurse practitioners, behavioral therapists, and probably many others I don't know about. Last I checked, all of the fields I mentioned are majority women. The salary ranges clear $100k though there's a generally higher education requirement for a given pay range. Although I think that is more an issue that tech has a uniquely low bar for formal education and a higher bar for informal education and experience.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#458

Post by door2 »

bluthru wrote: post #373
door2 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re a misogynist

The parent above me said "Women are socially smarter, so they are aware of that. Men are clueless" and I didn't resort to calling them a misandrist. Let's stick to talking about the issue at hand.

You called women catty. That’s straight up misogyny. I don’t know what else you want me to say.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#459

Post by door2 »

zxxon wrote: post #399
door2 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that’s the problem of sexist and racist white men who can’t believe that a woman or PoC could possibly be here based on merit and always treat them with suspicion. It’s not the fault of people trying to fix the problem.

If someone literally gets hired over some white dude by "virtue" of their gender and/or race, then they aren't there by merit. That's exactly what some ideologically (or PR) driven HR departments do. The suspicion is entirely warranted. The thing is, such practices also damage the self-image of the hire in question. Am I being hired for my abilities, or for being a number in some statistic?

White men get advantaged over nonwhite nonmen in pretty much all aspects of society. “Preferential” treatment towards people other than white men is really just a tiny little correction against the massive social and economic advantages white men experience. How many white men have you ever heard feeling bad because they were only hired for their white maleness (“Culture fit”)? And yet that is the dominant status quo hiring practice.

Re: Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies

#460

Post by [deleted] »

Caveman_Coder wrote: post #407
zxxon wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone literally gets hired over some white dude by "virtue" of their gender and/or race, then they aren't there by merit. That's exactly what some ideologically (or PR) driven HR departments do. The suspicion is entirely warranted. The thing is, such practices also damage the self-image of the hire in question. Am I being hired for my abilities, or for being a number in some statistic?

That is exactly what happened with my wife when she was a developer. She only likes coding and solving technical problems, the problem was her entire team was women and promoted this "yay sisterhood" groupthink, even to the point of openly talking about how they hired my wife so they could keep the team devoid of any males...she hated it so much and ended up going to a more technically-inclined and less sexist team b…

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